Developing enhanced impact models for integration with next generation NWP and climate outputs
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bristol
Department Name: Geographical Sciences
Abstract
Current best estimates indicate that approximately 5M people living in 2M properties are at risk of flooding resulting from extreme storms in the UK. Of these approximately 200,000 homes are not protected against a 1 in 75 year recurrence interval event, the Government's minimum recommended level of protection. When major floods do occur then total damage costs are high (£3.5Bn for the summer 2007 floods) and the total annual spending on flood defence approaches £800M. Protecting this population and minimizing these costs into the future requires the development of robust hydrologic and hydraulic models to translate the outputs from Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and climate models into meaningful estimates of impact (with uncertainty). These predictions of impact can then be used to plan investment decisions, provide real-time warnings, design flood defence schemes and generally help better manage storm risks and mitigate the effects of dangerous climate change. Building on foundations developed by consortium members as part of the NERC Flood Risk from Extreme Events (FREE) and EPSRC/NERC Flood Risk Management Research Consortium (FRMRC) Programmes, we here propose an integrated programme of research that will lead to step change improvements in our ability to quantify storm impacts over both the short and long term. Based on the knowledge gained in the above programmes, we suggest that improvements in storm impact modelling can be achieved through four linked objectives which we are uniquely positioned to deliver. Specifically, these are: 1. Downscaling, uncertainty propagation and evaluation of hydrologic modelling structures. 2. The development of data assimilation and remote sensing approaches to enhance predictions from storm impact models. 3. Fully dynamically coupled extreme storm surge and fluvial modelling. 4. The development of a new class of hydraulic model that can be used to convert predictions of rainfall-runoff or coastal extreme water levels to estimates of flood extent and depth at the resolution of LiDAR data (~1 - 2m horizontal resolution) over whole city regions using a true momentum-conserving approach. In this proposal we evaluate the potential of the above four approaches to reduce the uncertainty in ensemble predictions of storm impact given typical errors in the NWP and climate model outputs which are used as boundary forcing for impact modelling chains. Our initial characterization of the errors in predicted storm features (spatial rainfall and wind speed fields) in current implementations of NWP and climate models will be based on existing studies conducted by the UK Met Office and the University of Reading. As the project proceeds we will use the advances in storm modelling being developed for Deliverables 1 and 2 of this call to enhance our error characterizations and ensure that the techniques we develop are appropriate for current and future meteorological modelling technologies. We will rigorously evaluate the success of our proposed methods through the use of unique benchmark data sets of storm impact being developed at the Universities of Bristol and Reading.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
Paul Bates (Principal Investigator) | |
Jim Freer (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
Alfieri L
(2013)
Advances in pan-European flood hazard mapping
in Hydrological Processes
Aronica G
(2012)
Probabilistic evaluation of flood hazard in urban areas using Monte Carlo simulation
in Hydrological Processes
Bates P
(2013)
Observing Global Surface Water Flood Dynamics
in Surveys in Geophysics
Bates P
(2012)
Integrating remote sensing data with flood inundation models: how far have we got?
in Hydrological Processes
Biancamaria S
(2011)
Assimilation of virtual wide swath altimetry to improve Arctic river modeling
in Remote Sensing of Environment
Bogner K
(2012)
Technical Note: The normal quantile transformation and its application in a flood forecasting system
in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Bray M
(2010)
Rainfall uncertainty for extreme events in NWP downscaling model
in Hydrological Processes
Cloke H
(2012)
Modelling climate impact on floods with ensemble climate projections
in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Coulthard T
(2013)
Integrating the LISFLOOD-FP 2D hydrodynamic model with the CAESAR model: implications for modelling landscape evolution
in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms
De Almeida G
(2013)
Applicability of the local inertial approximation of the shallow water equations to flood modeling
in Water Resources Research
De Almeida G
(2012)
Improving the stability of a simple formulation of the shallow water equations for 2-D flood modeling
in Water Resources Research
Di Baldassarre G
(2011)
Timely Low Resolution SAR Imagery To Support Floodplain Modelling: a Case Study Review
in Surveys in Geophysics
Fenicia F
(2013)
Catchment properties, function, and conceptual model representation: is there a correspondence?
in Hydrological Processes
Fewtrell T
(2011)
Geometric and structural river channel complexity and the prediction of urban inundation
in Hydrological Processes
Fewtrell T
(2011)
Benchmarking urban flood models of varying complexity and scale using high resolution terrestrial LiDAR data
in Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C
García-Pintado J
(2015)
Satellite-supported flood forecasting in river networks: A real case study
in Journal of Hydrology
García-Pintado J
(2013)
Scheduling satellite-based SAR acquisition for sequential assimilation of water level observations into flood modelling
in Journal of Hydrology
Giustarini L
(2013)
A Change Detection Approach to Flood Mapping in Urban Areas Using TerraSAR-X
in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Jung H
(2012)
Calibration of two-dimensional floodplain modeling in the central Atchafalaya Basin Floodway System using SAR interferometry
in Water Resources Research
Leedal D
(2010)
Visualization approaches for communicating real-time flood forecasting level and inundation information
in Journal of Flood Risk Management
Lewis M
(2011)
Quantifying the Uncertainty in Future Coastal Flood Risk Estimates for the U.K
in Journal of Coastal Research
Lewis M
(2013)
Understanding the variability of an extreme storm tide along a coastline
in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science
Maskell J
(2014)
Investigating River-Surge Interaction in Idealised Estuaries
in Journal of Coastal Research
Mason D
(2012)
Near Real-Time Flood Detection in Urban and Rural Areas Using High-Resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar Images
in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Mason D
(2016)
Improving the TanDEM-X Digital Elevation Model for flood modelling using flood extents from Synthetic Aperture Radar images
in Remote Sensing of Environment
Mason D
(2012)
Automatic near real-time selection of flood water levels from high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar images for assimilation into hydraulic models: A case study
in Remote Sensing of Environment
Neal J
(2011)
How much physical complexity is needed to model flood inundation?
in Hydrological Processes
Neal J
(2012)
Probabilistic flood risk mapping including spatial dependence
in Hydrological Processes
Ozdemir H
(2013)
Evaluating scale and roughness effects in urban flood modelling using terrestrial LIDAR data
in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Prestininzi P
(2011)
Selecting the appropriate hydraulic model structure using low-resolution satellite imagery
in Advances in Water Resources
Sampson C
(2012)
An automated routing methodology to enable direct rainfall in high resolution shallow water models
in Hydrological Processes
Sampson C
(2014)
The impact of uncertain precipitation data on insurance loss estimates using a flood catastrophe model
in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Schumann G
(2012)
Fluvial Remote Sensing for Science and Management
Schumann G
(2011)
The accuracy of sequential aerial photography and SAR data for observing urban flood dynamics, a case study of the UK summer 2007 floods
in Remote Sensing of Environment
Schumann G
(2013)
A first large-scale flood inundation forecasting model Large-Scale Flood Inundation Forecasting
in Water Resources Research
Schumann GJ
(2014)
Technology: Fight floods on a global scale.
in Nature
Smith A
(2014)
Comparing ensemble projections of flooding against flood estimation by continuous simulation
in Journal of Hydrology
Smith A
(2014)
Investigating the application of climate models in flood projection across the UK INVESTIGATING THE APPLICATION OF CLIMATE MODELS
in Hydrological Processes
Souvignet M
(2013)
Recent climatic trends and linkages to river discharge in Central Vietnam
in Hydrological Processes
Stephens E
(2012)
The impact of uncertainty in satellite data on the assessment of flood inundation models
in Journal of Hydrology
Stephens E
(2014)
Problems with binary pattern measures for flood model evaluation PROBLEMS WITH BINARY PATTERN MEASURES FOR FLOOD MODEL EVALUATION
in Hydrological Processes
Stephens E
(2015)
Assessing the reliability of probabilistic flood inundation model predictions Reliability of Probabilistic Flood Inundation Predictions
in Hydrological Processes
Wetterhall F
(2012)
Conditioning model output statistics of regional climate model precipitation on circulation patterns
in Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics
YAMAZAKI D
(2015)
Rapid and Stable Flood Inundation Modelling Using the Local Inertial Equation ???????????????????????????
in Journal of Japan Society of Hydrology and Water Resources
Yamazaki D
(2013)
Improving computational efficiency in global river models by implementing the local inertial flow equation and a vector-based river network map
in Water Resources Research
Description | The DEMON project aims to improve our ability to quantify storm impacts and predict urban floods in greater detail. The project will significantly extend our ability to quantify storm impacts over both the short and long term through: • A better understanding of the errors in weather forecast and climate model rainfalls and the development of improved methods to characterize and correct these uncertainties • The development of methods to use satellite and airborne data on floods to improve flood forecasts • Improved methods to predict water extents, depths and velocities during floods for whole urban areas down to the resolution of individual buildings (1-2m horizontal resolution). |
Exploitation Route | Insurance and flood risk. This research will be of significant benefit to the UK's environment agencies, the insurance industry and consulting environmental engineers. The methods we have developed are already being taken up by all three sectors. |
Sectors | Environment |
URL | http://www.bgs.ac.uk/stormrm/demon.html |
Description | Two methods of distributed memory-parallelization of flood models have been developed and implemented. Preliminary tests have shown considerable improvement in the computational performance of the model. This enables the simulation of large-scale problems that so far have been difficult to perform because of the extremely high computational time associated. Further tests are now being carried out at Bristol¹s supercomputing facilities (Blue Crystal phases 2 and 3) using up to 256 cores. The methods developed use a dynamic domain partitioning strategy that continuously re-balances the computational load during flood propagation events. We have developed two new ways of harnessing many computers together to make flood risk predictions that enable the simulation of large-scale problems that so far have been difficult to perform because of the extremely high computational demand. |
Sector | Cultural,Societal |
Title | LISFLOOD-FP |
Description | LISFLOOD-FP is a state of the art two dimensional flood inundation model developed at the University of Bristol since 1999. |
Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
Year Produced | 2010 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | A shareware version and training materials are available from the University of Bristol web site and the model has been downloaded by over 500 unique users in > 60 countries since 2010. > 80 papers in International peer-reviewed journals have been written using the models. |
URL | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/geography/research/hydrology/models/lisflood/ |
Company Name | Fathom |
Description | Fathom researches and provides flood risk data services. |
Year Established | 2013 |
Impact | Development of the first high resolution global hydrodynamic model to produce global flood hazard layers. Collaboration with Google to host these layers on Google Earth Developed a bespoke flood hazard map for Belize for the World Bank |
Website | http://www.ssbn.co.uk |