Flood MEMORY: Multi-Event Modelling Of Risk & recoverY

The project will look at the most critical flood scenarios caused by sequences or clusters of extreme weather events striking vulnerable systems of flood defences, urban areas, communities and businesses. The project will analyse and simulate situations where a second flood may strike before coastal or river defences have been reinstated after damage, or householders and small businesses are in a vulnerable condition recovering from the first flood. By examining such events and identifying the worst case scenarios, we hope our findings will lead to enhanced flood resilience and better allocation of resources for protection and recovery. Ultimately the processes developed could be used worldwide.

Changes in the frequency and severity of flooding are under close scrutiny due to increased storminess in projections of future climate. The project will look at observed records of storms and try to understand how clustering may obscure or even exacerbate any climate induced changes. This is crucial for designing flood defence schemes now, which will operate for decades into the future, as current methods of estimating risk in a stationary climate do not fully account for the observed clustering of flood events and possible changes in variability.

Other aspects of the project will look at how coasts (beaches, dunes and engineered defences) and rivers behave during storms. Of particular interest is the effect of previous storms and floods moving sediment (i.e. shingle, sand and river bed material) so that the beach or river is in a different (perhaps weaker) condition when a second flood event arrives. The movement of sediment is difficult to predict as mostly happens during storms, so our knowledge of these processes is currently lacking.

The Environment Agency (EA), Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and DEFRA are responsible for flood risk management and environmental regulation in both coastal and fluvial settings and will therefore be major beneficiaries of the project's outputs. The EA will be a project collaborator so will be well placed to make the most of this opportunity. The major areas of interest are likely to be in improved understanding of long term processes of erosion and changes in flood risk and the implications for design and asset management on both coasts and rivers.

The engineering consultancy industry will benefit from significant outputs in terms of both detailed understanding and modelling capabilities of processes on coasts and in fluvial systems, and also in terms of understanding and methods for dealing with various types of non-stationarity in hazard series.

The insurance and re-insurance sectors are acutely conscious of the need for consideration of multiple and enhanced risks from changing hazard regimes. The industry, and the associated Cat Modelling industry, will benefit mostly from improved methods of estimating total risk under a variable hazard regime, with clear implications for better valuations at local, regional and even larger scales.

The public: communities, individuals, local authorities and businesses in the impact case study locations will benefit directly from the project. Engagement of local professionals such as health care and local authority personnel in the focus groups and engagement of the local business community via interviews during empirical data collection will facilitate dissemination of preliminary findings and longer term engagement in the project outcomes. In the longer term, a better understanding of risk and increased awareness of the irregularity in time of flood hazard can be achieved through engagement with the EA and local authorities who now have lead flood authority status.