Environment Agency Seeks Telemetry Systems for Flood Warning and Water Management

The Environment Agency depends on telemetry systems to provide real-time rainfall, river and coastal telemetry data essential to our flood warning, detection, forecasting and incident management services, to manage water resources and droughts and to provide evidence for permit determination.

The Environment Agency's telemetry systems are connected to a Hydrometric Monitoring Network of river gauging stations, river level sites, rain gauges and groundwater level sites, in addition to a portfolio of flood management structures. Telemetry is connected to around 6,000 remote sites, with the number increasing each year.

The telemetry systems collect data from these sites, and issue commands for remote operate of the flood management structures. The data collected underpins the EA's live situational awareness, supporting informed decision making, especially during major incidents. The remote control of operational structures can increase speed of response, reduce our carbon footprint and release field staff for deployment elsewhere.

Having collected the data, the telemetry systems present it to internal users, transfer it to other systems that consume it (e.g. IMFS - our flood forecasting system, WISKI - our hydrometric data archive). The data is also presented to the public in near real-time on the GOV.UK website through the live flood map and the Real Time Data API. The sites connected to telemetry are largely in remote locations.

This raises technological challenges for connecting to the sites. For decades, the principal means of connectivity was telephone 'landlines'. As mobile technology grew, cellular/mobile connections started also being used in the early 2000's. Both technologies were 'analogue' communication technologies.

In November 2017, the telecoms industry formally announced their intention to retire the analogue landline telephone networks, Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), by the end of 2025. More recently, cellular network operators began announcing 'sunset' dates for older cellular technologies, which included 2G-GSM technology. 2G-GSM will close over the period 2026-2033, depending on the network operator.

PSTN and 2G-GSM were the principal telecoms technologies used by our telemetry systems. All users of these obsolete technologies needed to migrate to newer, digital telecoms technologies, the transition to the new technologies is going to take time. Contract Variation amount for an additional 36 months is £354,636.64