On Friday 2nd of June 2017 Met Office issued a yellow warning of heavy rain with possible hail and lightning over London. Also Environmental Agency issued a number of flood alerts for London for the same period of time. This allowed us to test our newly setup system for recording open data CCTV images from London Transport Cameras (aka JamCams).

Following the flood alerts we setup to record all Transport for London (TFL) cameras which where within the main flood alert areas, these were 4 areas in London.

Figure 1. Areas selected for recording TFL CCTV camera images on 2nd of June 2017 corresponding to flood alerts from Environmental Agency.

This resulted in downloading images from just over 110 CCTV cameras accross from  the marked areas in Figure 1. Dowload started on many cameras at 2:30pm on 2nd of June 2017 and continued for 24h with an image downloaded every 5min.

Many of these images showed heavy rain as it passed over London on the afternoon of the 2nd June 2017; some cameras even captured images of lightning which was seen over North London but we didn’t capture any images of flooding in the four coloured areas in Figure 1.

Figure 2. Image of heavy rain on A23 Brixton Rd/Vassell Rd as seen by one of the CCTV cameras in London on 2nd July 2017 at 5:19pm
Figure 3. Image of lightning on captured on London CCTV camera at A12 East Cross Route on 2nd of June 2017 at 4:17pm

However, following the flooding allert on London for Transport site allowed us to capture surface flooding that happened on the North Circular road between 4-7pm resulting in traffic jams in the area.

Figure 4. Map of the surface flooding on the North Circular on 2nd of June 2017

The surface flooding was very localised and only one camera captured it, the one just below the blue circle in the Figure 4. We recorded both still and video images from this camera.

We are currently setting up similar systems to download live traffic CCTV images from Leeds, Bristol, Exeter, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Tewkesbury.