The Dynamic Drivers of Flood Risk (DRIFT)
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Department Name: Geography - SoGE
Abstract
The cost of floods averages more than £2 billion annually in the UK and is feared to keep rising as the climate changes. However, there are critical gaps in our understanding of what drives flood nonstationarity, affecting stakeholders' ability to make planning decisions about appropriate levels of flood risk management, land use, or infrastructure required to protect populations.
This project - the Dynamic Drivers of Flood Risk (DRIFT) - has been designed to address crucial challenges in understanding past and future changes in flood properties to improve decision-making support. The overarching aim is to develop a unified understanding of flood nonstationarity from the past into the future (1970-2070), transitioning seamlessly from short to long timescales. DRIFT will develop the first past-present-future prediction system allowing stakeholders to generate robust scenarios of drifting flood characteristics from the past into the future.
Probabilistic models will be developed describing the influence of changing weather characteristics, climate, engineering structures, and land cover on flood properties, such as flood peaks, return periods, probabilities, durations and extent. Past trends in flood properties will be seamlessly linked with future climate forecasts, predictions and projections, over short- to long-term horizons. Future changes in flood properties will be estimated using a multi-model ensemble approach that seamlessly combines climate timescales (seasonal forecasts, decadal predictions, and multi-decadal projections) and land cover scenarios (such as urbanisation or afforestation), as well as management decisions.
This past-present-future prediction system will be integrated within a decision support framework, providing simple and intuitive ways to display complex information on flood evolution. DRIFT's aim is to support stakeholders in making the best planning decisions to manage flood risks and achieve other co-benefits. A user-friendly decision support system will be co-developed to visualise changing flood characteristics under different scenarios. This tool will provide seamless information and visualisations of changing flood properties from the near to far future, for a range of climate and land cover scenarios.
DRIFT has an iterative structure, with Phase I focusing on co-developing the models and decision support software with five key groups of UK flood stakeholders and project partners. Phase II subsequently expands to other regions of the world where observational streamflow data are available. The long-term aim is to develop robust decision-making support on the evolution of flood characteristics, providing direct benefits for societies globally.
This project - the Dynamic Drivers of Flood Risk (DRIFT) - has been designed to address crucial challenges in understanding past and future changes in flood properties to improve decision-making support. The overarching aim is to develop a unified understanding of flood nonstationarity from the past into the future (1970-2070), transitioning seamlessly from short to long timescales. DRIFT will develop the first past-present-future prediction system allowing stakeholders to generate robust scenarios of drifting flood characteristics from the past into the future.
Probabilistic models will be developed describing the influence of changing weather characteristics, climate, engineering structures, and land cover on flood properties, such as flood peaks, return periods, probabilities, durations and extent. Past trends in flood properties will be seamlessly linked with future climate forecasts, predictions and projections, over short- to long-term horizons. Future changes in flood properties will be estimated using a multi-model ensemble approach that seamlessly combines climate timescales (seasonal forecasts, decadal predictions, and multi-decadal projections) and land cover scenarios (such as urbanisation or afforestation), as well as management decisions.
This past-present-future prediction system will be integrated within a decision support framework, providing simple and intuitive ways to display complex information on flood evolution. DRIFT's aim is to support stakeholders in making the best planning decisions to manage flood risks and achieve other co-benefits. A user-friendly decision support system will be co-developed to visualise changing flood characteristics under different scenarios. This tool will provide seamless information and visualisations of changing flood properties from the near to far future, for a range of climate and land cover scenarios.
DRIFT has an iterative structure, with Phase I focusing on co-developing the models and decision support software with five key groups of UK flood stakeholders and project partners. Phase II subsequently expands to other regions of the world where observational streamflow data are available. The long-term aim is to develop robust decision-making support on the evolution of flood characteristics, providing direct benefits for societies globally.
Organisations
- UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD (Lead Research Organisation)
- ENVIRONMENT AGENCY (Collaboration, Project Partner)
- UK Centre For Ecology & Hydrology (Collaboration)
- JBA Consulting (Project Partner)
- US Geological Survey (USGS) (Project Partner)
- ECMWF (UK) (Project Partner)
- Flood Forecasting Centre FFC (Project Partner)
- JBA Trust (Project Partner)
- UK CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY (Project Partner)
Publications
Anderson B
(2022)
Statistical Attribution of the Influence of Urban and Tree Cover Change on Streamflow: A Comparison of Large Sample Statistical Approaches
in Water Resources Research
Berghuijs W
(2023)
Groundwater shapes North American river floods
in Environmental Research Letters
Buechel M
(2024)
Hydrometeorological response to afforestation in the UK: findings from a kilometer-scale climate model
in Environmental Research Letters
Chai Y
(2024)
Global reduction in sensitivity of vegetation water use efficiency to increasing CO2
in Journal of Hydrology
Chai Y
(2022)
Constrained CMIP6 projections indicate less warming and a slower increase in water availability across Asia.
in Nature communications
Coxon G
(2024)
Wastewater discharges and urban land cover dominate urban hydrology signals across England and Wales
in Environmental Research Letters
| Description | Reliable predictions of flooding can help society to manage the associated risk to lives and property. However, it is challenging to predict whether we might see more or fewer floods over the next 1-10 years, due to the difficulty of simulating dynamic changes in atmospheric circulation at these timescales. The research from the DRIFT project has revealed that a large ensemble of climate models can be used to predict average winter flood conditions over the UK in the next decade. Although the climate models underestimate the magnitude of atmospheric variability in the north Atlantic, we have shown that identifying a subset of skillful climate model simulations improves the ability to predict floods. Our results suggest that decadal climate predictions over the next 2-5 years may be useful for flood risk management. |
| Exploitation Route | This research has shown that floods can be predicted 2-5 years ahead. Multiyear averages could be used for operational flood prediction by flood forecasting agencies, to provide an indication of whether floods are likely to occur more or less frequently in the coming years. |
| Sectors | Environment Other |
| URL | https://eos.org/editor-highlights/predicting-flood-conditions-in-the-next-few-years |
| Description | Impact is just starting to emerge from this work. This section will be updated at a later date. Dr Slater is working with the UK Environment Agency, who are interested in using the new AI-based attribution methods developed in her latest work. The American Geophysical Union's journal EoS published an editor's highlights piece about one of the papers: https://eos.org/editor-highlights/predicting-flood-conditions-in-the-next-few-years Dr Slater gave a "School members" lecture to Sixth Form students at the Royal Geographical Society on the factors explaining the evolution of flooding at the global scale. Dr Slater was invited by BBC Radio 4 to talk about how floods are evolving across the UK in the programme called "The Briefing Room". |
| First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
| Sector | Environment |
| Impact Types | Societal Economic Policy & public services |
| Description | Appointed to the UK Flood Hydrology Roadmap Scientific and Technical Advisory Group (STAG) |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Description | UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI for the Environment (Intelligent Earth) |
| Amount | £11,933,597 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/Y030907/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 03/2024 |
| End | 03/2031 |
| Title | Global River Topology (GRIT) |
| Description | The Global River Topology (GRIT) is a vector-based, global river network that not only represents the tributary components of the global drainage network but also the distributary ones, including multi-thread rivers, canals and delta distributaries. It is also the first global hydrography (excl. Antarctica and Greenland) produced at 30m raster resolution. It is created by merging Landsat-based river mask (GRWL) with elevation-generated streams to ensure a homogeneous drainage density outside of the river mask (rivers narrower than approx. 30m). Crucially, it uses a new 30m digital terrain model (FABDEM, based on TanDEM-X) that shows greater accuracy over the traditionally used SRTM derivatives. After vectorisation and pruning, directionality is assigned by a combination of elevation, flow angle, heuristic and continuity approaches (based on RivGraph). The network topology (lines and nodes, upstream/downstream IDs) is available as layers and attribute information in the GeoPackage files (readable by QGIS/ArcMap/GDAL). |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The river network is under ongoing development. As of on 5 March 2024, it has had 626 downloads. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/records/8322965 |
| Title | RivRetrieve R package for accessing real-time river stage and discharge from national-level river agencies |
| Description | A new R package was created and successfully uploaded to the CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network) which allows users to access global river gauge data from a variety of national-level river agencies. The package interfaces with the national-level agency websites to provide access to river gauge locations, river discharge, and river stage. Currently, the package is available for the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | tbd |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10125516 |
| Title | Global River Topology (GRIT) |
| Description | The Global River Topology (GRIT) is a vector-based, global river network that not only represents the tributary components of the global drainage network but also the distributary ones, including multi-thread rivers, canals and delta distributaries. It is also the first global hydrography (excl. Antarctica and Greenland) produced at 30m raster resolution. It is created by merging Landsat-based river mask (GRWL) with elevation-generated streams to ensure a homogeneous drainage density outside of the river mask (rivers narrower than approx. 30m). Crucially, it uses a new 30m digital terrain model (FABDEM, based on TanDEM-X) that shows greater accuracy over the traditionally used SRTM derivatives. After vectorisation and pruning, directionality is assigned by a combination of elevation, flow angle, heuristic and continuity approaches (based on RivGraph). The network topology (lines and nodes, upstream/downstream IDs) is available as layers and attribute information in the GeoPackage files (readable by QGIS/ArcMap/GDAL). |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Too early to assess impact. 626 downloads to date, as of 5 March 2024. |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/records/8322965 |
| Title | Snakemake workflow: uk-decadal-flood-prediction |
| Description | A Snakemake workflow for making decadal flood predictions using CMIP5/6 decadal hindcasts. The workflow reproduces the results described in our research article: Moulds S, Slater LJ, Dunstone NJ, Smith DM (2023). Skillful decadal flood prediction. Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2022GL100650. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL100650. This dataset contains the workflow itself (workflow/*), a configuration file (config/config.yml), the data required to run the workflow (resources/*), and the output from the most recent top to bottom run (results/*). The workflow itself, without any data, corresponds to release v1.0.0. To use the Github repository you should copy the resources directory from this dataset to the project root and create a results directory prior to running the workflow. |
| Type Of Material | Data analysis technique |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | It is too early to describe impact. |
| URL | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6940449 |
| Description | Environment Agency/Oxford |
| Organisation | Environment Agency |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | Talk given by Louise Slater to Environment Agency's Joint Flood Hydrology teams on 14 February 2024 |
| Collaborator Contribution | Contribution to research ideas -several online meetings throughout the duration of the DRIFT project |
| Impact | Not yet, other than the talk. |
| Start Year | 2021 |
| Description | UKCEH/Oxford collaboration on nonstationarity of UK flooding |
| Organisation | UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The Oxford team gave a talk at UKCEH in 2023. |
| Collaborator Contribution | UKCEH contributed to our Flood workshop held at the University of Oxford in 2023. Jamie Hannaford and I co-wrote an article for The Conversation in 2024. |
| Impact | Article in The Conversation titled "Extreme UK flood levels are happening much more often than they used to, analysis shows", Published: January 10, 2024 |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | BBC Radio 4 The Briefing Room - Is the UK prepared for more floods? |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Invited guest on the 'Briefing Room' podcast of BBC radio 4 to talk about how floods are changing over the UK and what we can do to prepare for future flooding. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vlg9 |
| Description | Co-convened the HEPEX Workshop on "Forecasting across spatial scales and time horizons" at SMHI, Norrköping, Sweden |
| 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 | Supported the organisation of an international workshop of hydrological forecasters from around the world, focussing on the different needs of the sector for improving hydro-meteorological predictions. The workshop took place at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), a Swedish government agency which operates under the Ministry of the Environment, in Norrköping, Sweden from 13-15 September 2023. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://hepex.org.au/hepex-workshop-2023-forecasting-across-spatial-scales-and-time-horizons/ |
| Description | Invited talk - 40th anniversary of the British Hydrological Society |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Over 100 participants attended the British Hydrological Society's 40th anniversary celebration. This was a one-day event celebrating the theme of "hydrology learning across the generations" with 11 invited speakers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.ice.org.uk/events/latest-events/40-years-of-the-bhs |
| Description | Invited talk - 40 years of the National River Flow Archive |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Invited speaker for the British Hydrological Society's workshop event "Celebrating 40 years of the UK National River Flow Archive (NRFA)". My talk was titled "The NRFA: an invaluable resource for understanding how flood risk is changing in the past and into the future". 12 October 2023 https://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/news/celebrating-40-years-national-river-flow-archive |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjbE-4Pn4kA |
| Description | Invited talk - American Geophysical Union 2023 - Advances in Hybrid Prediction of Hydrometeorological Extremes: Decadal Prediction |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was an invited talk in the session on Hydrometeorologic Extremes: Prediction, Simulation, and Change at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Invited talk, American Geophysical Union 2023 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I gave a solicited talk entitled "Climate change and urbanisation intensify floods most in groundwater-dominated rivers" in AGU Session H22H - Recent Advances in Large-Scale Flood Modeling and Hydroclimatic Extremes. The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest conference of geophysical scientists, held annually in the USA. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Royal Geographical Society School Member Lecture: Explaining the evolution of floods in time and space |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The Royal Geographical Society's School Member Lectures are run 3 times a year and are for School Members (approx. 700 schools) to attend. They are held at the Society's HQ in London, and are attended by A Level students and their teachers. These lectures are free for School Members to attend; they are recorded and put online for School Members afterwards. I gave this lecture to a live audience of school members on 1 March 2023 at the RGS. The recording of my talk is available online to all School members of the RGS (at https://www.rgs.org/schools/teaching-resources/explaining-the-evolution-of-floods-in-time-and-spa/) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.rgs.org/schools/teaching-resources/explaining-the-evolution-of-floods-in-time-and-spa/ |