Flood-PREPARED: Predicting Rainfall Events by Physical Analytics of REaltime Data

Flood-PREPARED will develop an international leading capability for real-time surface water flood risk and impacts analysis for cities. Our vision is to provide the tools and methods that allow cities to become proactive, rather than be reactive, to managing surface water flooding

This will be achieved by developing new physical analytical methods that integrate advanced urban flood hazard models with statistical analytics of big data from multiple real-time data-feeds that describe the current state and condition of the city in terms of surface water flood risk and impacts. By coupling physically-based modelling and statistical analytics, decision makers will be provided with improved real-time predictions of surface water flooding to assist in flood mitigation at a range of governance scales; from the individual site through to national emergency and response. This vision will be delivered via five interrelated work packages:

Work package 1 will develop the data management platforms required for capturing, managing and making available the wide variety of real-time data that will be utilised, including real-time weather radar, environmental weather station data feeds, sewer telemetry gauging, CCTV data and traffic congestion data. Data comes from Newcastle's £1.5m Urban Observatory that includes hundreds of pervasive environmental sensors that currently record ~1million observations per day.

Work package 2 will employ this data within a new hydrodynamic surface water flood model that employs statistical data assimilation and modelling for improved real-time calibration and parameterisation for surface water flooding. The outputs of the hydrodynamic surface water flood model will be used in work package 3 to parameterise real-time impacts analysis. Using real-time data feeds such as CCTV, social media, traffic monitoring, new predictive models of how impacts evolve and cascade within cities will be developed for improved response and mitigation.

Work package 4 will develop the integrated computational workflow and scheduling software required for the tools and methods of work package 2 and 3 to be employed in an operational manner. An operational 'live' demonstrator of the system will be implemented in work package 5.

Working with key strategic project partners the demonstrator will be rigorously evaluated through a series of case studies at the individual site, city and national scale to evaluate how improved surface flood risk mitigation in real-time can be undertaken.

Flood-PREPARED aims to change the way that surface water flooding in cities is managed. Beneficiaries of this project are potentially wide ranging across the spectrum of flood governance; from individual site estate and services, through to national emergency planning. Decision makers at a range of levels of government (including national agencies, devolved administrations and local authorities), engineering consultancies, flood risk management, distribution network operators, emergency services and insurance companies will benefit from the improved response to surface water flooding in cities that Flood-PREPARED will provide. Flood-PREPARED has recognised three impact priorities (IPs) around which we will focus our activities in knowledge transfer and dissemination, namely;

IP1: A hub of excellence in physical analytics for real-time environmental risk mitigation.
The new tools and models developed by Flood-PREPARED are firmly entrenched in the rapidly emerging field of physical analytics; the coupling of advanced statistical modelling and physically-based models. Impact of the advances achieved by Flood-PREPARED in this field will be achieved by dissemination in international journals. The research team has an excellent record of publication in top quartile journals in flooding, statistical modelling and big data cloud computing. The Flood-PREPARED consortium is based around open and accessible software development; we will provide an external facing project GitLab from which all new software tools and models developed in Flood-PREPARED can be retrieved. The skills developed by the researcher body during Flood-PREPARED will be highly sought within industry and academic roles. Our researchers will therefore become the next generation of highly trained mathematical modellers and computer scientists to lead the future development of real-time environmental risk analysis.

IP2: A catalyst for improved surface water flood risk mitigation in cities nationally.
The new understanding that will be provided by Flood-PREPARED offers a unique opportunity for the UK over the next 10-years to develop robust ahead of event surface water flood risk mitigation. Our vison is that cities across the UK develop sensor platforms that duplicate that of Newcastle to facilitate this capability. Our case studies have been carefully designed to facilitate the impact and outreach required to initiate this transformation. Co-production lies at the heart of case studies in order to maximise industry relevant outputs that inform real decision making into the future. Via secondments will disseminate our state of the art understanding to industry and develop a portfolio of knowledge of the best practice in implementing such systems in other cities. Understanding of surface water flooding and the risks it poses is recognised as requiring greater attention by key national agencies (e.g., Environment Agency). Flood-PREPARED will actively engage with key national strategic reviews such as the next round of the National Flood Resilience review to provide new insight and evidence to the challenges of developing robust surface water flood mitigation.

IP3: To improve citizen resilience to surface water flooding in cities.
Flooding of property can have a devastating effect on individuals and lead to long term disruption. Our 'community' dashboard will allow citizens to engage with the warning of flooding predicted; thus allowing proactive mitigation by individuals and local communities to potential flood risk. We will work with local community flood groups to establish how the outputs of Flood-PREPARED can be utilised by the individual to improve mitigation.