Smart forecasting: joined-up flood forecasting (FF) infrastructure with uncertainties
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sheffield
Department Name: Civil and Structural Engineering
Abstract
Reliable and comprehensive flood forecasting is crucial to ensure resilient cities and sustainable socio-economic development in a future faced with an unprecedented increase in atmospheric temperature and intensified precipitation. Floodwaters from the areas surrounding a city can heavily affect flood cycle behaviour across urban areas, introducing uncertainties into the forecast that are often non-negligible. However, currently the extent to which we can predict flood hazards is limited, and existing methods cannot for example deal with inter-regional dependencies (e.g. as was seen when floods affected nine different countries across Central and Eastern Europe). Presently in the UK approx. 25% of yearly flood insurance claims are from areas outside the zones forecast to be at flood risk, and annual flood damage costs are already high (approx. £1.5 billion). Also more than 20,000 houses per year continue to be built on floodplains.
The need to transform flood forecasting for a range of applications and scales has already been recognised by various parties. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017 Evidence Report prioritises flooding as the greatest direct climate change related threat for UK cities now and in the future, and urges urgent action to be taken, including the development of new solutions over the next 5 years. The hydraulic software industry and consultancy firms have expressed a desire for more reliable and sophisticated flood forecasting approaches, which can also reduce the manual labour required. In addition, mathematics and engineering research communities are still searching for forecasting models that are joined-up, reliable and efficient, as well as versatile and adaptable.
To address this need, 'Multi-Wavelets' technology will be employed in this fellowship with a view to transforming flood forecasting routines from a disparate set of activities into a unified automatic framework. The applicant's vision is to exploit the innate capability of Multi-Wavelets technology to reformulate flood forecasting methods by providing a smart modelling foundation for the delivery of timely and accurate flood maps, alongside statistically quantified uncertainties. This research presents a unique opportunity for the applicant, UK academia and UK industry, to establish a world leading capability in a nascent field while addressing Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) priorities for improved forecasting of environmental change.
The fellowship research will stimulate the creation of new software infrastructure capable of significantly improving our flood forecasting ability across length scales and under multiple uncertainties, helping us to better design infrastructure against flood risk and to plan for the consequences.
The need to transform flood forecasting for a range of applications and scales has already been recognised by various parties. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017 Evidence Report prioritises flooding as the greatest direct climate change related threat for UK cities now and in the future, and urges urgent action to be taken, including the development of new solutions over the next 5 years. The hydraulic software industry and consultancy firms have expressed a desire for more reliable and sophisticated flood forecasting approaches, which can also reduce the manual labour required. In addition, mathematics and engineering research communities are still searching for forecasting models that are joined-up, reliable and efficient, as well as versatile and adaptable.
To address this need, 'Multi-Wavelets' technology will be employed in this fellowship with a view to transforming flood forecasting routines from a disparate set of activities into a unified automatic framework. The applicant's vision is to exploit the innate capability of Multi-Wavelets technology to reformulate flood forecasting methods by providing a smart modelling foundation for the delivery of timely and accurate flood maps, alongside statistically quantified uncertainties. This research presents a unique opportunity for the applicant, UK academia and UK industry, to establish a world leading capability in a nascent field while addressing Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) priorities for improved forecasting of environmental change.
The fellowship research will stimulate the creation of new software infrastructure capable of significantly improving our flood forecasting ability across length scales and under multiple uncertainties, helping us to better design infrastructure against flood risk and to plan for the consequences.
Planned Impact
Flooding presents a major long term threat to the economy and wellbeing of people living and working in their communities. More than 5 million properties in England are already 'at risk' of flooding, with an increase in flood risk across all UK regions predicted given the current trend of global temperature increase (CCRA Evidence Report 2017). This fellowship will support the development of new mathematical approaches designed to increase the reliability and timeliness of the provision of flood forecast information (in line with ambition R5 of the 'Resilient Nation' theme of the EPSRC Delivery Plan 2016/17-2019/20). Together with the general public, those with the responsibility of forecasting, assessing and/or managing flood risk will benefit from more comprehensive quantification of flood risk at a city-wide scale and more accurate prioritisation of the highest risk zones. These beneficiaries include the Environment Agency and those working in the water consultancy and software industries, local authorities, water companies, emergency responders and the insurance industry.
Hydraulics-based software providers and engineering consultants involved in this fellowship (BMT-WBM, CH2M, XP Solutions, Innovyze and DHI) will have immediate access to the transformative approaches developed which are designed to move flood forecasting from a disparate set of activities into a unified automatic framework. Developing and extending their products as a result of the fellowship will enable them to: (i) more effectively and efficiently handle day-to-day flood modelling activities, e.g. by a reduced reliance on user iterations to build and run a model for individual flood risk assessment projects, and (ii) to become more competitive in the global market for water modelling services.
The Environment Agency (EA) will also have immediate access to the research outputs. Their 'Flood and Coastal Risk Management Research and Development' team will monitor the fellowship's research, with a view to answering key strategic questions related to flood forecasting and risk management (Collaborative Research Priorities for the Environment Agency 2016-20). This fellowship will develop a modelling framework capable of modelling the flood flow interdependencies that exist between different regions. This can be expected to benefit the EA in mitigating against severe events such as flash floods, and policy-makers in addressing key national strategic needs, such as the need to better protect and/or restrict the development of assets located on floodplains (the UK is building faster on floodplains than anywhere else, with approx. 1500 new homes built annually in 'high risk' areas (Committee on Climate Change 2015)).
The fellowship will involve personnel co-working with mathematicians, engineers and scientists, conducting research placements, and participating in industry and public engagement activities. Hence, it will generate unique skills and capabilities that can be deployed by UK organisations and private companies to maximise the social, economic and environmental impacts of the research.
In summary, the outcomes of this research will significantly benefit the UK public living in and around flood-prone areas, who will be better informed of the likely consequences of impending climatic events, and businesses who can take steps to reduce disruption of their activities, helping to ensure affordable insurance premiums and better quality of life.
Hydraulics-based software providers and engineering consultants involved in this fellowship (BMT-WBM, CH2M, XP Solutions, Innovyze and DHI) will have immediate access to the transformative approaches developed which are designed to move flood forecasting from a disparate set of activities into a unified automatic framework. Developing and extending their products as a result of the fellowship will enable them to: (i) more effectively and efficiently handle day-to-day flood modelling activities, e.g. by a reduced reliance on user iterations to build and run a model for individual flood risk assessment projects, and (ii) to become more competitive in the global market for water modelling services.
The Environment Agency (EA) will also have immediate access to the research outputs. Their 'Flood and Coastal Risk Management Research and Development' team will monitor the fellowship's research, with a view to answering key strategic questions related to flood forecasting and risk management (Collaborative Research Priorities for the Environment Agency 2016-20). This fellowship will develop a modelling framework capable of modelling the flood flow interdependencies that exist between different regions. This can be expected to benefit the EA in mitigating against severe events such as flash floods, and policy-makers in addressing key national strategic needs, such as the need to better protect and/or restrict the development of assets located on floodplains (the UK is building faster on floodplains than anywhere else, with approx. 1500 new homes built annually in 'high risk' areas (Committee on Climate Change 2015)).
The fellowship will involve personnel co-working with mathematicians, engineers and scientists, conducting research placements, and participating in industry and public engagement activities. Hence, it will generate unique skills and capabilities that can be deployed by UK organisations and private companies to maximise the social, economic and environmental impacts of the research.
In summary, the outcomes of this research will significantly benefit the UK public living in and around flood-prone areas, who will be better informed of the likely consequences of impending climatic events, and businesses who can take steps to reduce disruption of their activities, helping to ensure affordable insurance premiums and better quality of life.
Organisations
- University of Sheffield (Fellow, Lead Research Organisation)
- BMT Group (Collaboration)
- LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY (Collaboration)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Collaboration)
- DHI Group (Collaboration)
- CH2M HILL (Collaboration)
- Innovyze (Collaboration)
- Environment Agency (Collaboration, Project Partner)
- Democritus University of Thrace (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS (Collaboration)
- NORCE Norwegian Research Center AS (Collaboration)
- University of Bristol (Collaboration)
- BMT Group (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
- Danish Hydraulic Institute (Project Partner)
- Sheffield City Council (Project Partner)
- Jacobs (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
- XP Software Solutions Ltd (Project Partner)
- University of Bristol (Project Partner)
- University of East Anglia (Project Partner)
- Innovyze Limited (Project Partner)
- University of Leeds (Project Partner)
People |
ORCID iD |
| Georges Kesserwani (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Ayog J
(2021)
Second-order discontinuous Galerkin flood model: Comparison with industry-standard finite volume models
in Journal of Hydrology
Chowdhury A
(2023)
GPU-parallelisation of Haar wavelet-based grid resolution adaptation for fast finite volume modelling: application to shallow water flows
in Journal of Hydroinformatics
Georges Kesserwani
(2023)
Shallow-Flow Velocity Predictions Using Discontinuous Galerkin Solutions
in Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Hajihassanpour M
(2023)
Sampling-Based Methods for Uncertainty Propagation in Flood Modeling Under Multiple Uncertain Inputs: Finding Out the Most Efficient Choice
in Water Resources Research
Kesserwani G
(2019)
(Multi)wavelets increase both accuracy and efficiency of standard Godunov-type hydrodynamic models
in Advances in Water Resources
Kesserwani G
(2023)
(Multi)wavelet-based Godunov-type simulators of flood inundation: Static versus dynamic adaptivity
in Advances in Water Resources
Kesserwani G
(2020)
(Multi)wavelets increase both accuracy and efficiency of standard Godunov-type hydrodynamic models: Robust 2D approaches
in Advances in Water Resources
Kesserwani G
(2018)
Discontinuous Galerkin formulation for 2D hydrodynamic modelling: Trade-offs between theoretical complexity and practical convenience
in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering
Sharifian M
(2019)
Performance study of the multiwavelet discontinuous Galerkin approach for solving the Green-Naghdi equations
in International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids
Sharifian M
(2018)
A discontinuous Galerkin approach for conservative modeling of fully nonlinear and weakly dispersive wave transformations
in Ocean Modelling
Sharifian M
(2023)
LISFLOOD-FP 8.1: new GPU-accelerated solvers for faster fluvial/pluvial flood simulations
in Geoscientific Model Development
Shaw J
(2020)
Probabilistic Godunov-type hydrodynamic modelling under multiple uncertainties: robust wavelet-based formulations
in Advances in Water Resources
Shaw J
(2021)
LISFLOOD-FP 8.0: the new discontinuous Galerkin shallow-water solver for multi-core CPUs and GPUs
in Geoscientific Model Development
Shaw J
(2020)
Stochastic Galerkin Finite Volume Shallow Flow Model: Well-Balanced Treatment over Uncertain Topography
in Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Shirvani M
(2021)
Flood-pedestrian simulator for modelling human response dynamics during flood-induced evacuation: Hillsborough stadium case study
in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
Shirvani M
(2020)
Agent-based modelling of pedestrian responses during flood emergency: mobility behavioural rules and implications for flood risk analysis
in Journal of Hydroinformatics
Shirvani M
(2021)
Agent-based simulator of dynamic flood-people interactions
in Journal of Flood Risk Management
Shirvani M
(2019)
Agent-based simulator of dynamic flood-people interactions
Shirvani M
(2021)
Flood-pedestrian simulator user guide
Sun X
(2023)
Simulation of laminar to transitional wakes past cylinders with a discontinuous Galerkin inviscid shallow water model
in Journal of Hydraulic Research
Özgen-Xian I
(2020)
Wavelet-based local mesh refinement for rainfall-runoff simulations
in Journal of Hydroinformatics
| Description | The award established an interdisciplinary research group with a range of backgrounds and complementary skills that worked together to yield achievements that have accelerated the progress of flood modelling and forecasting. The most significant achievements have included: Simplified re-formulation of a discontinuous Galerkin solver that increases the modelling accuracy using polynomial to evolve the flood flow and represent terrain data, to follow a similar formulation as the de facto industry-standard flood modelling tools; and with comparative studies over real case scenarios of how it can be used at 2 to 10 times coarser resolution to modelling flooding propagations. Deeper and practical understanding of what the self-scaling properties of (multi)wavelets can do to support scalability flood modelling at a range of scales, with rigorous exploitation of their properties to achieve both static-in-time and dynamic-in-time adaptivity of resolution scales within reformulated finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin solvers. Analysis of the most practical combination for (multi)wavelets adaptive multiresolution flood modelling from analytical testing to real-world flooding case studies. For example, using multiwavelets with the polynomial Galerkin accuracy as a grid generator of static multiresolution meshes is found more beneficial to adapted reduced complexity flow solver to boost runtimes from 28 times to up to 320 times for large-scale fluvial/pluvial flood simulations over large areas. This type of meshes are necessary to capture terrain connectivities and wetting and drying to inform hydrological processes more accurately. On the other hand, dynamic resolution adaptivity has been found to be more efficient when increasing the complexity of flow to combine multiwavelets with the discontinuous Galerkin in the formulation, however, is found practical for rapid and multiscale flooding applications (e.g. tsunami inundations) or as an alternative to very complex turbulent flow simulator to capture detailed information of velocity fields. All the solvers that were developed have been parallelised on the graphics processing unit, to boost runtimes, and integrated in an open-source releases of the widely-used LISFLOOD-FP software, with three documented and published releases so far and two planned releases. This has been on key achievement as the publications reporting the integrated solvers on LISFLOOD-FP are the most cited and the open-source versions of the software has received more than 2500 downloads. Once the solvers were in place, another notable achievement was the exploitation and exploration of wavelets and many other methods to quantify multiple sources of uncertainty more efficiently in probabilistic flood modelling. A key finding, that sparked interest from flood modelling practitioners, has been the utility of wavelet-based and quasi-Monte Carlo sampling (non-random) to produce outputs probabilistic distribution of flood hazards with reduced samples sizes. Other new areas span out during the research leading insightful outcomes. One covered soft agent-based modelling that combined flood modelling with human behaviour dynamics to modelling the interactions between flood and people in an emergency evacuation, with fast outcomes using the parallelisation of the graphics processing units. The other covered the utility of the discontinuous Galerkin solver as faster alternative to complex turbulent flow solvers to support environmental hydraulics applications such the tracking of solute transport and mixing characteristics in vegetated ponds. |
| Exploitation Route | A number of stakeholders have reported benefited from the findings of achievement (See Narrative impact). |
| Sectors | Aerospace Defence and Marine Communities and Social Services/Policy Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Environment Government Democracy and Justice |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com |
| Description | A considerable impact has been the training of many experts, experiences in the latest technologies emerging for improved flood modelling and forecasting, four of whom are now employed in the UK by companies. These companies are benefiting from their skills to improve the efficency and reduce the costs of hydraulic consultancy projects, and to improve their flood modelling and forecasting software towards producing smarter and more accurate flood zoning to better protect flood-prone societies. From the enquires received from international end-users and the high downloads of our open-sourcing codes, many stakeholders have benefited from our flood modelling tools to support real-world modelling case studies for other projects. Users includes people from the UK, Europe, Ethiopia, India, and the US, among many other countries the most recent of which the adoption of one of our flood models for integration and use in an urban flood risk assessment framework by US regional government agencies and municipalities. Academically, the most popular research area that sprang out from this research is the complexity modelling of flood and people interactions using integrative approach that incorporates the urban environmental changes, the behaviour changes of people in/to floodwaters, flooding propagations and flexible and high-performance computing. Since the publications of our approach, many related approaches emerged very quickly in the flood resilience field and other fields on complexity science for disaster risk management. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
| Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Environment,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal Economic Policy & public services |
| Description | Development of new training/educational materials for postgraduates/research users |
| Geographic Reach | Multiple continents/international |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Impact | Updated the a course taught to postgraduate students to include latest development on flooding modelling technologies (course name: "Computational methods for water engineering", University of Sheffield). Uploaded research software and datasets for the published papers into an open-source platform (https://zenodo.org/record/4073011, more than 2500 downloads to date), and a detailed user guide (https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0) to train many community to learn the new developments and to apply them in their research projects. The changes are being noticed from the many quieries we receive from our students and research scientists worldwide, asking questions inspired from the educational materials placed on the website. In October 2023, MIT asked for our permission for integrating the software into a US Goverment toolkit for use by regional municipal agencies. |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0 |
| Description | More efficient quantification of uncertainties |
| Geographic Reach | Multiple continents/international |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to new or improved professional practice |
| Impact | Our most efficient method for quantifying uncertainties can be used to make probabilistic modelling over very small sample size, e.g. in the magnitude of 2000 to 4000 samples, instead of 10,000 to 40,000 as is the standard. This should be able to save a lot of elecricity to make comutational runs, staff time, and many other costs. |
| URL | https://drive.google.com/file/d/13CXNd1SKRiDTcA1CaJB4k70VuHh4ef7z/view |
| Title | An agent-based flood-pedestrian simulator ported into a UK national facility |
| Description | The simulator tool allows microscopic modelling of individual people's responses as they interact with floodwater. It is useful to support flood risk management research and applications. For example, it can be used to evaluate the spatial and temporal changes in the flood risk state of people, as well as their mobility and stability during an urban flood incident. It can also be used to evaluate options for an emergency intervention just within hours before a severe flooding. As a flexible agent-based simulator, it allows to realistically characterise individual people behaviours in floodwater, e.g. to integrate different physical body characteristics, walking/running speeds in water depending on the age and gender, and to even insert new attributes, features and vulnerability metrics to facilitate multidimensional flood-related studies. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The most notable imact from this development has been a series of diaglogues with the developers of the world-leading Life Safety Model (https://lifesafetymodel.net/), onto how it can be supported with a functionality for micro-simulation of the uncertain interaction of people with urban floodwaters. These dialogues resutled in a joint grant proposal submission that is pending a decision. |
| URL | https://dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator/ |
| Title | Augmenting the LISFLOOD-FP software with new solvers |
| Description | Many advanced numerical solvers and efficiency enhancement tools have been integrated into LISFLOOD-FP (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/geography/research/hydrology/models/lisflood/). LISFLOOD-FP was initally developed in the UK Food Risk Managment Research Consortium from 20 years ago. It is a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model specifically designed to simulate floodplain inundation in a computationally efficient manner over complex topography. LISFLOOD-FP has already been used by a variety of research group worldwide, and the added components have been documented including video tutorials to further promote the usability of the software worldwide (https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0). We collaborated with colleagues at the University of Bristol (Prof. Bates and Neal) to augment the capabilities of LISFLOOD-FP with more advanced solvers for multiscale modelling and futher update the open-source version. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Since the release of our updated version 8.0 of LISFLOOD, we have received an great deal of enquiries from researcher worldwide for using it and sharing best practice with us. So far, the sofware has been dowloaded more than 2500 times with great international interest as evidenced by the high number of quieries we have received on its usability. LISFLOOD is already used by many research group and businesses and the additions we have made to it are imacting many users intersted to support more detailed and efficient flood modelling activites. In October 2023, the leader of the Urban Risk Lab from MIT (https://urbanrisklab.org/mit-cgc/) contacted me seeking approval to integrate our latest release of LISFLOOD-FP into a US Government urban flooding toolkit for use by municipal and regional agencies. |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0 |
| Title | One-dimensional Fortran 2003 finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamic models with wavelet-based adaptivity |
| Description | Fortran 2003 models for solving the one-dimensional shallow water equations with topography and friction using Godunov-type finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin methods. Models can run with wavelet-based adaptivity enabled, or with adaptivity disabled on uniform meshes. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The proposed methods has attracted a collaboration with US researcher to add wavelet-based grid resolution adaptivity into a hydrological model for rainfall-runoff simulation (https://iwaponline.com/jh/article/22/5/1059/73853/Wavelet-based-local-mesh-refinement-for-rainfall). So far the code received 32 downloads and the paper reporting it has received more than 1000 reads on research gate, suggesting a great level of interest. |
| URL | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309170819301770 |
| Title | Sampling-based uncertainty quantification methods |
| Description | Sampling based uncertainty propagation approaches has been integrated into a framework for probabilistic flood maping from any existing deterministic models. The framework considers a range of modern uncertainty quantification methods and is aimed to accelerate probabilistic flood modelling by using alternatives to the Standard Monte Carlo method (SMC). The methods include Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), Adaptive Stratified Sampling (ASS), Quasi Monte Carlo (QMC) and Haar Wavelet Expansion (HWE) as they can capture all types of histogram distributions. The code to test and run these alternatives for three realistic case studies with many uncertain inputs can be found on https://zenodo.org/record/7050213, and the paper reporting the resutls is still under reviewer for publication in 2023. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The key impact of this proposed research framework is new evidenced-based guidance on the most suited uncertainty quantification method for probablistic flood modelling featured with multiple uncertain input paramters. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/7050213 |
| Title | Two-dimensional Fortran 2003 finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamic models with (multi)wavelet-based adaptivity |
| Description | Fortran 2003 models for solving the two-dimensional shallow water equations with topography and friction using Godunov-type finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin methods. Models can run with (multi)wavelet-based adaptivity enabled, or with adaptivity disabled on uniform meshes. The code can be compiled using Intel Fortran Compiler in both Windows and Linux. Other Fortran compilers have not been tested. Windows users can simply add the source files to the project created for Microsoft Visual Studio or any other IDE. Linux users can use the included makefile to compile the codes. The user can configure the simulations by modifying config.dat input file. A suite of two-dimensional test cases are preconfigured. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Will be released in July 2023 from the Zenodo repository. Meanwhile, the key impact of this research has been to collaborate with colleagues from the University of Bristol to augment LISFLOOD-FP with the wavelet-based grid resolution adaptivity alongside GPU parallelisation for faster flood simulations (https://gmd.copernicus.org/preprints/gmd-2022-259/; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309170822002202). |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/394172 |
| Title | Benchmarking (multi)wavelet-based dynamic and static non-uniform grid solvers for flood inundation modelling (Simulation results) |
| Description | Simulation result data for Environment Agency benchmark test 5, Thamesmead hypothetical flood, and Carlisle 2005 case studies, using uniform DG2, adaptive MWDG2, adaptive HWFV1, non-uniform DG2, non-uniform FV1 and non-uniform ACC solvers. Model results are archived in 3 zip files: EA5.zip contains results of Environment Agency test 5 (Néelz and Pender, 2013) Thamesmead.zip contains results of Thamesmead hypothetical flood (Liang et al., 2008) Carlisle.zip contains results of Carlisle 2005 flooding (Neal et al., 2009) The results are stored with the following file extensions: ".wd" for 2D flood inundation maps in ESRI ASCII format ".stage" for water depth or water level time-series at staging points in tabulated text format ".velocity" for velocity time-series at staging points in tabulated text format Model outputs are stored under directories named for each solver. References Néelz, S., & Pender, G. (2013). Benchmarking the latest generation of 2D hydraulic modelling packages. Environment Agency: Bristol, UK. Liang, Q., Du, G., Hall, J. W., & Borthwick, A. G. (2008). Flood Inundation Modeling with an Adaptive Quadtree Grid Shallow Water Equation Solver. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 134(11), 1603-1610. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9429(2008)134:11(1603) Neal, J. C., Bates, P. D., Fewtrell, T. J., Hunter, N. M., Wilson, M. D., & Horritt, M. S. (2009). Distributed whole city water level measurements from the Carlisle 2005 urban flood event and comparison with hydraulic model simulations. Journal of Hydrology, 368(1-4), 42-55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.01.026 |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | They have been downloaded by other groups for use in alternative research projects |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/5047565 |
| Title | Efficient uncertainty propagation approaches (stochastic Galerkin approaches with and without local wavelet-based refinement) |
| Description | The models and results are to support understanding the methods reported in https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)HY.1943-7900.0001705 and in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309170819306281 |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Opening a potential direction for future research in shallow flow modelling to model uncertainty more efficiently than the conventional Monte-Carlo methods to run many simulations (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309170821000221). This method has started to receive popularity in the computational hydraulics community (number of views and download counts can be found on Zenodo). |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/2592000 |
| Title | Flood-pedestrian simulator user guide |
| Description | This document provides: a brief overview of the flood-pedestrian simulator's algorithmic structure (accessible at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4564288) step-by-step guidance for users to run the simulator on their own machine for two test cases reported in the Shirvani et al. (2020), Shirvani et al. (2021) and Shirvani & Kesserwani (2021) papers (see also the demo videos); explanation of the outputs from the simulator with guidance on how to modify the simulations by changing the environment parameters (outputs from the test cases reported in Shirvani & Kesserwani (2021) are also available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4576906); and guidance on how to apply the simulator to new test cases using the available tools and models designed for this purpose. |
| Type Of Material | Data analysis technique |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Many researchers in the UK has been refering to this document to apply the flood-pedestrian simulation to other UK case studies of flood risk mitigation and alleviation. |
| URL | https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/21/3175/2021/nhess-21-3175-2021-discussion.html |
| Title | LISFLOOD-DG2 simulation set-up files and additional datasets |
| Description | The set-up files (including initial & boundary conditions and digital elevation model) for LISFLOOD-DG2 have been provided for the following test cases: Test 1: Vortex shedding past a conical island Test 3: Flow diversion at a T-junction, and Test 4: Flooding in an urban residential area The data for the initial condition, boundary condition and topography data for Test 2: Recirculation flow in sharp building cavities are also included, as .txt and .csv format. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The paper describing the utility of this data sets has just come out (https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JHEND8.HYENG-13244). Therefore, it is expected that impact of this data sets will appear in the next year or so. |
| URL | https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JHEND8.HYENG-13244 |
| Title | Modelling results for the analytical assessment (Sec. 2.3) and EA benchmark tests (Sec. 3) |
| Description | These datasets contains the flow profiles and time histories produced by the FV1, MUSCL-FV2, DG2-NL and DG2-LL for the following tests: Sec. 2.3: Analytical assessments of model conservation properties: Time histories of normalised total energy and mass error from FV1, MUSCL-FV2, DG2-NL and DG2-LL at 20m and 40m grid resolution. Water level profiles at 7tau/2 and 8tau from FV1, MUSCL-FV2, DG2-NL and DG2-LL at 40m grid resolution, along with the analytical solutions. Sec. 3: Comparison against industrial flood model outputs Sec. 3.1.1: Flooding and drying cycle over a sloping topography: Time histories of water level from DG2-LL and DG2-NL at 10m resolution, DG2-NL and MUSCL-FV2 at 20m resolution, and the reference solution. Sec. 3.1.2: Symmetrical flow propagation over a flat bed: Time histories of water level and velocity from from DG2-LL and DG2-NL at 5m resolution, DG2-NL and MUSCL-FV2 at 10m resolution, and the reference solution. Sec. 3.1.3: Slow filling of multiple ponds: Time histories of water level from from DG2-LL and DG2-NL at 20m resolution, DG2-NL and MUSCL-FV2 at 40m resolution, and the reference solution. Sec. 3.2.1: Momentum conservation over an obstruction: Time histories of water level and velocity from from DG2-LL and DG2-NL at 5m resolution, DG2-NL and MUSCL-FV2 at 10m resolution, and the reference solution. Sec. 3.2.2: Torrential flooding over a rural catchment: Time histories of water level and velocity from from DG2-LL and DG2-NL at 50m resolution, DG2-NL and MUSCL-FV2 at 100m resolution, and the reference solution. Sec. 3.2.3: Dam-break over an oblique building: Time histories of water level and velocity from from DG2-LL and DG2-NL at 0.1m resolution, and DG2-LL and MUSCL-FV2 at 0.2m resolution. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Very useful for benchmarking other flood models. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/3760628 |
| Title | Reconstructed DEM of the Morgan-Selwyn floodway with added building piers |
| Description | These datasets contain the DEM of Morgan-Selwyn floodway in Merewether, Australia, which has been generated using the rescaled bathymetry data in Smith et al., (2017), with small blocks representing the building piers added. Two different resolutions are considered, namely: Merewether DEM with 0.175m resolution (i.e. 'merewether-0p175m.asc') that is used to produce simulation results in Ayog et al. (2021), and Merewether DEM with 0.010m resolution (i.e. 'merewether-0p01m.zip') for the start-up training of LISFLOOD 8.0 (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Merewether.html) |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | A complex data set that was produced as part of our research to analyse "Shallow-Flow Velocity Predictions Using Discontinuous Galerkin Solutions" (https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JHEND8.HYENG-13244). This particualr data set has received a high number of downloads, more than 135, suggesting that it is useful to other researcher working on bencharking the ability of flood models to predict the velocity fields. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/5069224 |
| Title | Smart and flexible multiresolution wavelet-based flood models |
| Description | In support of the methods described in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309170819301770 and in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309170820303079. |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | One direct impact was a collaboration with US researchers in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to develop and validate Wavelet-based local mesh refinement (wLMR) for rainfall-runoff simulations for real-word catchments. The wLMR approach is being integrated into the hydrogeological tool 'TINerator' to augment its mesh generation capability. The general impact of these new methods can also be evidenced by the number of downloads and views on Zenodo. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/1745471 |
| Title | Two-dimensional Fortran 2003 finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamic models with (multi)wavelet-based adaptivity |
| Description | Fortran 2003 models for solving the two-dimensional shallow water equations with topography and friction using Godunov-type finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin methods. Models can run with (multi)wavelet-based adaptivity enabled, or with adaptivity disabled on uniform meshes. The code can be compiled using Intel Fortran Compiler in both Windows and Linux. Other Fortran compilers have not been tested. Windows users can simply add the source files to the project created for Microsoft Visual Studio or any other IDE. Linux users can use the included makefile to compile the codes. The user can configure the simulations by modifying config.dat input file. A suite of two-dimensional test cases are preconfigured. |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The models are embargoed until the end of 2023. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/3941723 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | BMT Group |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | CH2M HILL |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | DHI Group |
| Country | Global |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | Environment Agency |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | Innovyze |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | Loughborough University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | University of Bristol |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | A advisory network of academic and industrial partners |
| Organisation | University of Leeds |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The fellowship team was committed to demonstrate research-led theoretical developments to improve real-world modelling of flood inundations. Contributions were informed by meetings with the partners to address the following thematic areas (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Developments): (1) Integration of human response dynamics into flood risk assessments; (2) Efficient propagation of many uncertainties into probabilistic flood modelling (3) Exploitation of parallel computing architectures for faster large-area simulations; (4) Design of scalability simulators with increased accuracy and adaptive resolutions; and (5) Incorporation of multi-physics processes including solute and debris in floodwaters. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Industrial partners contributed by sharing their software results and data, and their expertise on the modelling needs for real-world applications. The Environment Agency provided information of relevance to the computerization of the flood people-simulator and access to case their standard case studies for bechmarking. The academic partners contributed to provide feedback over publication drafts and to steering the direction of the research. In particualr, The partner from Bristol provided us with a vesion of the LISFLOOD-FP hydraulic modelling software for open-source integration including the latest development emerging in the resarch. |
| Impact | LISFLOOD-FP version 8.0 that integrates a new DG2 hydrodynamic solvers and a new parallel platform on GPU (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and grid adaptivity for fast compulation at the catchement scale (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-259); the flood-people simulator for dynamic modelling of flood-people interactions during a flood (https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-3175-2021), that has been ported to DAFNI, https://www.dafni.ac.uk (https://www.dafni.ac.uk/project/flood-people-simulator); and, the comparative uncertainty quantification framework (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011), or toolkit (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) identifying the most efficient sampling-based method to reduce sample size in the reproduction of output probability distributions of flood-related quantities, which have been receiving great interest from practionners such as JACOBS and Anglian Water. The members of this Network, in addition to invited national and international supporters from across a mix of disciplines from psychology to flooding, supported a workshop in Sheffield: "Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry workshop" in Sept. 2021(https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021)*. Among the above-listed outputs, 'the comparative uncertainty quantification framework' was the most called for by the workshop participants, in attempts to find out a more practical alternative uncertainty quantification method to the standard Monte Carlo method. * The workshop was postponed twice (June 2020 to June 2021) in response to the COVID19 pandemic, and was finally held remotely . |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | Efficient uncertainty propagation in flood modelling |
| Organisation | Democritus University of Thrace |
| Country | Greece |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | A collaboration with an applied mathematician, Dr. Per Pettersson from the Norwegian Research Centre, who is expert on advanced uncertainty propagation methods for a wide range of engineering problems, and civil engineer, Dr Vassils Bellos, who is expert on uncertainties in the field of flood modelling. Our main contribution has been to transfer and explore many new mathematical concepts for improving the efficiency of uncertainty propagation methods in the context of flood inundation modelling. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Pettersson has provided hands-on support and software access to relatively new uncertainty quantification methods for applying them in the context of flood modelling; whereas Dr. Bellos has provided expertise on how to randomise the input uncertain parameter for flood modelling. |
| Impact | The first output of this collaboration has led to new method highlighting a potential direction for future research in shallow flow modelling (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309170819306281), as part of a special issue on "Innovations towards the next generation of shallow flow models (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2021.103867). The method has the potential to enable much more efficient quantification of uncertainty in various applications such as probabilistic flood forecasting and risk assessment, and has been made accessible (https://zenodo.org/record/3600494; and https://zenodo.org/record/3600480). The second output has been a comparative study of this method and four other methods for efficient capturing of flood frequency for the relevant quantities of interest to help practionners choose better altenatives the standard Monte Carlo Method for probabilsitic flood modelling. The study was informed by practionners' needs indentified in the 'Flood modelling & forecasting challenges in industry' workshop (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021). This led to a study (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011) with code sharing and datasets (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) for others to reproduce the work. The finding sparked interest from many researchers and practionners, e.g. Anglian Water and Jacobs, to consider the integration of the our most efficient choice identified in the study into their pratice. The post-doc who carried out this study has been employed by Jacobs to transfer some of the outcomes into their 'flood modeller' software suite, whereas Anglian Water initated a visit to Sheffield in Jan. 2024 to expore funding a project for adopting our efficient uncertainty toolkit for practical use. More can be found on: https://www.seamlesswave.com/Uncertainty_Propagation |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Efficient uncertainty propagation in flood modelling |
| Organisation | NORCE Norwegian Research Center AS |
| Country | Norway |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | A collaboration with an applied mathematician, Dr. Per Pettersson from the Norwegian Research Centre, who is expert on advanced uncertainty propagation methods for a wide range of engineering problems, and civil engineer, Dr Vassils Bellos, who is expert on uncertainties in the field of flood modelling. Our main contribution has been to transfer and explore many new mathematical concepts for improving the efficiency of uncertainty propagation methods in the context of flood inundation modelling. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Pettersson has provided hands-on support and software access to relatively new uncertainty quantification methods for applying them in the context of flood modelling; whereas Dr. Bellos has provided expertise on how to randomise the input uncertain parameter for flood modelling. |
| Impact | The first output of this collaboration has led to new method highlighting a potential direction for future research in shallow flow modelling (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309170819306281), as part of a special issue on "Innovations towards the next generation of shallow flow models (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2021.103867). The method has the potential to enable much more efficient quantification of uncertainty in various applications such as probabilistic flood forecasting and risk assessment, and has been made accessible (https://zenodo.org/record/3600494; and https://zenodo.org/record/3600480). The second output has been a comparative study of this method and four other methods for efficient capturing of flood frequency for the relevant quantities of interest to help practionners choose better altenatives the standard Monte Carlo Method for probabilsitic flood modelling. The study was informed by practionners' needs indentified in the 'Flood modelling & forecasting challenges in industry' workshop (https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021). This led to a study (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR034011) with code sharing and datasets (https://zenodo.org/records/7050213) for others to reproduce the work. The finding sparked interest from many researchers and practionners, e.g. Anglian Water and Jacobs, to consider the integration of the our most efficient choice identified in the study into their pratice. The post-doc who carried out this study has been employed by Jacobs to transfer some of the outcomes into their 'flood modeller' software suite, whereas Anglian Water initated a visit to Sheffield in Jan. 2024 to expore funding a project for adopting our efficient uncertainty toolkit for practical use. More can be found on: https://www.seamlesswave.com/Uncertainty_Propagation |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | Integrating a wavelet-based grid generator for rainfall runoff modelling at catchement scale |
| Organisation | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | Collaboration with US researchers in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop and validate Wavelet-based local mesh refinement (wLMR)for rainfall-runoff simulations for real-world catchments. The wLMR apporach is being integrated into the hydrogeological tool 'TINerator' to augment its mesh generation capability (https://github.com/lanl/tinerator). |
| Collaborator Contribution | The partners provided software for rainfall runoff modelling to explore how much it can be made efficient by integrating a multiscale grid generator support by the wavelets algorihtm devleopped by our university. |
| Impact | The outomes of this collaboration has been published in the Journal of Hydroinformatics and the software that has been improved as a resut of this collaboration with a demonstraton over a catchement-scale case study. |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Title | Flood-pedestrian simulator |
| Description | The flood-pedestrian simulator is developed within the Flexible Agent-based Modelling Environment for the GPU FLAMEGPU framework for modelling multiple agent interactions on CUDA Cores for parallel processing on Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | To be continued |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/Flood_Human_ABM.html |
| Title | LISFLOOD-FP 8.1 hydrodynamic model |
| Description | LISFLOOD-FP is a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model specifically designed to simulate floodplain inundation in a computationally efficient manner over complex topography. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | We have had two released so far (10.5194/gmd-16-2391-2023; 10.5194/gmd-14-3577-2021) and the third release is going to be published in 2024. The papers reporting these releases have each received 3000 reads per year, and the software received around 60 download per mother, with a total of more than 2500 as yet (https://zenodo.org/records/6912932). We recieve many quieries per year, from users worldwide, evidencing that the software is being used in practice. In October 2023, the leader of the Urban Risk Lab from MIT (https://urbanrisklab.org/mit-cgc/) contacted me seeking approval to integrate our latest release of LISFLOOD-FP into a US Government urban flooding toolkit for use by municipal and regional agencies. |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0 |
| Title | Two-dimensional Fortran 2003 finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamic models with (multi)wavelet-based adaptivity |
| Description | Fortran 2003 models for solving the two-dimensional shallow water equations with topography and friction using Godunov-type finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin methods. Models can run with (multi)wavelet-based adaptivity enabled, or with adaptivity disabled on uniform meshes. The code can be compiled using Intel Fortran Compiler in both Windows and Linux. Other Fortran compilers have not been tested. Windows users can simply add the source files to the project created for Microsoft Visual Studio or any other IDE. Linux users can use the included makefile to compile the codes. The user can configure the simulations by modifying config.dat input file. A suite of two-dimensional test cases are preconfigured. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/record/3941722 |
| Description | Engagement with software developers and end-users |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Six industrial delegates and 5 academic delegate attended a focused industrial meeting at the University of Sheffield which sparked critics and discussion afterwards, and the industry delegates reported increased interest and support in terms of provision of data and existing software results to help better validate the new flood modelling tools being developed. In this meeting, the panel was particularly in favor of conducting a comparative study of uncertainty quantfication mehtods for practical flood inundation modelling, and such a study is currently ongoing. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| Description | Engagement with software developers and end-users |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Six industrial delegates and 5 academic delegate attended a focused industrial meeting at the University of Sheffield which sparked critics and discussion afterwards, and the industry delegates reported increased interest and support in terms of provision of data and existing software results to help better validate the new flood modelling tools being developed. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019,2020 |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/Activities.html |
| Description | Engagement with the public at Sheffield to make them understand: How do computers forecast floods? |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Public engagement presentation, "How do computers forecast floods?" It was held as part of the "Pint of Science, Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield (M. K. Sharifian). Mohammad talked about the importance of flood forecasting systems, how they work and what are the challenges in improving the flood forecasts. The presentation followed with Q&A from many members of the public, asking clarification on the role of computer modelling in the understanding of flood risk to properties. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-r7LbF9SkBfxxsSLyGZ2axyEm2iWGHnJ/edit#slide=id.p1 |
| Description | Exhibition at Flood Expo 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Participation in the Flood Expo 2019 (http://www.thefloodexpo.co.uk) to showcase new research developments to a range of stakeholders, through exhibition panels (J. Ayog, M. Shirvani & G. Kesserwani). In particular, our 'agent-based flood-people simulator' attracted great interest from flood defense designers and companies in the UK and the EU, leading to them to providing us with the data needed to computerise alternative to sandbagging into our flood-people simulator. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://www.thefloodexpo.co.uk/ |
| Description | Festival of the Mind 2020 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The event was to showcase the real-time visualization capability of a 'food-pedestrian simulator' applied to a flood-prone site around Hillsborough football stadium, which sparked questions and discussions from members of the general public, in particular those who experienced the 2007 Sheffield flood who provided us with valuable data to improve the simulator. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://festivalofthemind.sheffield.ac.uk/2020/ |
| Description | Festival of the Mind: How do computers forecast floods? |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | M. K. Sharifian was also awarded "Partnerships & Regional Engagement" funds to design a toolkit over a 6-month project that concluded with him demonstating futher to the general public "How do computers forecast floods?" supported with live visualisation. The real-time visulation toolkit was for people to use and explore to better understand the impact and concequences of flooding events. It was presented over the 10-day " Festival of the Mind 2022" during Sept. 2022. The toolkit was explored by many people, in the presence of a delegate to answer emerging questions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://festivalofthemind.sheffield.ac.uk/2022/futurecade/interactive-visualization-software-for-flo... |
| Description | Flood Risk Workshop assembling people in academia, industry (R&D), and government agencies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Supporters |
| Results and Impact | An invitation-only NASA-supported 'Flood risk workshop' (Oct 2018, Colorado, USA) in which invited talks were delivered by charitable organisation or flood related businesses. The event aimed to identify minimal requirements for mapping global flood risk that meets user needs, to promoting citizen science and start new collaborative partnerships. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://sites.google.com/view/flood-risk-ws |
| Description | Flood modelling and forecasting challenges in industry virtual workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The workshop was supported by TWENTY65. It brought together practitioners and scholars, in an attempt to identify and discuss timely issues in operational-scale flood modelling, forecasting and management. The workshop aimed to increase our understanding of industrial and practical needs that require further addressing in academic research. The focus was on the themes: Overview of flooding challenges, Modelling, Resilience. The workshop was facilitated by a series of invited talks by experts from academia, industry and UK organisations. Title of the talks and speakers' information are listed in the agenda (see the appendix). During the lunch break, there was a virtual networking event on Gather Town allowing participants to meet each other online. At the end of the workshop, participates were directed into Miro's whiteboards letting them enter their thoughts, comments and ideas. A direct outcome of the workshop is an online post-workshop report written based on compiling and analysing the participants' inputs. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/Workshop_16Sep2021.html |
| Description | Invited talk at the University of Machester |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Invited seminar talk for the "Water, Ocean, Coastal and Environmental Engineering with Geotechnics" (WOCEE-G) at the University of Manchester (G. Kesserwani). Title: "Benchmarking uncertainty propagation methods for flood hazard frequency analysis in response to multiple uncertain inputs". The talk addressed a wide range of audience members (15-25) from experimental to computational researchers all focused on water-related research, and stimulated questions on how to best tackle uncertainties in modelling activities with minimum computational costs. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_nV5uinfD4GAHJZRGTP6yHmA3muhhAMx/view |
| Description | Promoting and facilitating the utility of our new DG2 flood model and the GPU platform added to LISFLOOD-FP |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This activity is part of a knowledge exchange project award from the University of Sheffield (2021, Jan.-Mar.). The project aims to document our new contribution to LISLFOOD-FP (Shaw et al. 2021), a software widely used within the hydraulic and hydrologic modelling communities (https://gmd.copernicus.org/preprints/gmd-2020-340/). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/LISFLOOD8.0 |
| Description | Showcase of GPU-accelerated adaptive flood modelling with the developers of TUFLOW sofware |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Two from the software development team of the TUFLOW flood modelling software attended the meeting where our team showcased the benefit from parallelising adaptive finite volume flood modelling on the Graphical Porcessing Units (GPU). The meeting sparked questions on the extent to which dynamic modelling in time can be faster and this has lead to provided further assessment of speed-up with respect to operation flood modelling tools and a report on the subject afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Showcase of the flood-pedestrian simulator at the UKCRIC Digital theme workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Participation in the UKCRIC Digital theme workshop, University of Cambridge. Aimed to explore the UK research activities focussing on digitalisation in the built environment across the UKCRIC institutions. The flood-pedesrtian simulator was presented, with a particular focus on how it computerise people's risk perception to floodwater in modelling a mass evacuation scenarios. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ukcric.com/news/ukcric-workshop-explores-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-digitalisat... |
| Description | Talk to engage with the public in the Millenium Gallery, Sheffield (20 Sept. 2019) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Public engagement presentation: "What happens the day after tomorrow: how do computers forecast floods?" delivered in the Pop-Up University talks, Millenium Gallery, Sheffield (J. Shaw). James' talk explained how the Environment Agency is collecting high-resolution terrain data across the UK in order to produce national flood hazard maps, and he showed how his research, developing uncertainty quantification methods, can help flood risk managers to assess their confidence in computer flood simulations. 20 civilians attended the talk, which sparked questions and discussion afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.museums-sheffield.org.uk/whats-on/events/2019/9/pop-up-university |
| Description | Two-day assembly on 'Advances in flood modelling and forcasting' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This two-day event presented recent research developments and discussed research findings and questions, covering fundamental, computational and applied aspects of flood modelling and forecasting. It provided a unique forum for research students, academics, flood-related researcher developers and practitioners to discuss latest research and future needs, over an excellent networking opportunity. Details of the event's programme, the post-event story and the video-recorded presentations and discussions can be found on this link: https://www.seamlesswave.com/2024_Feb_Event.html |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.seamlesswave.com/2024_Feb_Event.html |