Subdaily rainfall extremes have been found to intensify, both from observations and climate model simulations, but much uncertainty remains regarding future changes in the spatial structure of rainfall events. Here, future changes in the characteristics of heavy summer rainfall are analyzed by using two sets (1980–2000, 2060–2080) of 12‐member 20‐year‐long convection‐permitting ensemble simulations (2.2 km, hourly) over the UK. We investigated how the peak intensity, spatial coverage and the speed of rainfall events will change and how those changes jointly affect hourly extremes at different spatial scales. We found that in addition to the intensification of heavy rainfall events, the spatial extent tends to increase in all three subregions, and by up to 49.3% in the North‐West. These changes act to exacerbate intensity increases in extremes for most of spatial scales (North: 30.2%–34.0%, South: 25.8%). The increase in areal extremes is particularly pronounced for catchments with sizes 20–500 km2.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens of the United Kingdom were required to stay at home for many months in 2020. In the weeks before and months following lockdown, including when it was not being enforced, citizens were advised to stay at home where possible. As a result, in a megacity such as London, where long-distance commuting is common, spatial and temporal changes to patterns of water demand are inevitable. This, in turn, may change where people's waste is treated and ultimately impact the in-river quality of effluent receiving waters. To assess large scale impacts, such as COVID-19, at the city scale, an integrated modelling approach that captures everything between households and rivers is needed. A framework to achieve this is presented in this study and used to explore changes in water use and the associated impacts on wastewater treatment and in-river quality as a result of government and societal responses to COVID-19. Our modelling results revealed significant changes to household water consumption under a range of impact scenarios, however, they only showed significant impacts on pollutant concentrations in household wastewater in central London. Pollutant concentrations in rivers simulated by the model were most sensitive in the tributaries of the River Thames, highlighting the vulnerability of smaller rivers and the important role that they play in diluting pollution. Modelled ammonia and phosphates were found to be the pollutants that rivers were most sensitive to because their main source in urban rivers is domestic wastewater that was significantly altered during the imposed mobility restrictions. A model evaluation showed that we can accurately validate individual model components (i.e., water demand generator) and emphasised need for continuous water quality measurements. Ultimatly, the work provides a basis for further developments of water systems integration approaches to project changes under never-before seen scenarios.

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<p>Sub-daily precipitation at fine temporal resolution (~1 km2) is critical for a wide range of hydrological applications, such as flooding estimation, urban drainage design. In recent years, a step-change was given by Km-scale Convection-permitting models (CPMs), allowing for the first-time climate change projections at hydrologically relevant scales. CPMs have been now introduced in the operational climate change projections of the Met Office in the UK (UCKP18). The high-resolution hourly precipitation at a 2.2 km scales is currently available for the historical period (1980-2000) and future period (2020-2080) for the RCP8.5 scenario. It is perceived to provide a plausible tool for detailed climate impact studies. However, a question remains unanswered: is the local projection of precipitation from UKCP18 credible for hydrological use? </p><p>To answer the question, simulated hourly precipitation from the UKCP18 for the historical period is compared statistically with the observed rainfall data. Observation rainfall was obtained from UK Met Office C-band Weather Radar network and Gridded estimates of daily areal rainfall (CEH-GEAR). These were used to assess the spatial-temporal structure of rainfall, including spatial spectra, distributions of rainfall cell sizes and intensities, and their temporal growth/decay dynamics, and rainfall extremes. The statistical evaluation was performed for all climatologically distinct regions of the UK on a seasonal basis.</p><p>The results show that hourly precipitation in UKCP18 has a realistic spatial correlation structure compared to observations. However, the extreme areal mean precipitation is overestimated, particularly at scales finer than 6.6 km. Significant differences between the size and temporal dynamics of observed and modelled rainfall cells were identified, with distinct differences amongst climate regimes, highlighting the limits of applicability of current generation CPMs for hydrological forecasting.</p>

<p>In this work a two-stage (rainfall nowcasting + flood prediction) analogue model for real-time urban flood forecasting is presented. The proposed approach accounts for the complexities of urban rainfall nowcasting while avoiding the expensive computational requirements of real-time urban flood forecasting.</p><p>The model has two consecutive stages:</p><ul><li><strong>(1) Rainfall nowcasting: </strong>0-6h lead time ensemble rainfall nowcasting is achieved by means of an analogue method, based on the assumption that similar climate condition will define similar patterns of temporal evolution of the rainfall. The framework uses the NORA analogue-based forecasting tool (Panziera et al., 2011), consisting of two layers. In the <strong>first layer, </strong>the 120 historical atmospheric (forcing) conditions most similar to the current atmospheric conditions are extracted, with the historical database consisting of ERA5 reanalysis data from the ECMWF and the current conditions derived from the US Global Forecasting System (GFS). In the <strong>second layer</strong>, twelve historical radar images most similar to the current one are extracted from amongst the historical radar images linked to the aforementioned 120 forcing analogues. Lastly, for each of the twelve analogues, the rainfall fields (at resolution of 1km/5min) observed after the present time are taken as one ensemble member. Note that principal component analysis (PCA) and uncorrelated multilinear PCA methods were tested for image feature extraction prior to applying the nearest neighbour technique for analogue selection.</li> <li><strong>(2) Flood prediction: </strong>we predict flood extent using the high-resolution rainfall forecast from Stage 1, along with a database of pre-run flood maps at 1x1 km<sup>2</sup> solution from 157 catalogued historical flood events. A deterministic flood prediction is obtained by using the averaged response from the twelve flood maps associated to the twelve ensemble rainfall nowcasts, where for each gridded area the median value is adopted (assuming flood maps are equiprobabilistic). A probabilistic flood prediction is obtained by generating a quantile-based flood map. Note that the flood maps were generated through rolling ball-based mapping of the flood volumes predicted at each node of the InfoWorks ICM sewer model of the pilot area.</li> </ul><p>The Minworth catchment in the UK (~400 km<sup>2</sup>) was used to demonstrate the proposed model. Cross‑assessment was undertaken for each of 157 flooding events by leaving one event out from training in each iteration and using it for evaluation. With a focus on the spatial replication of flood/non-flood patterns, the predicted flood maps were converted to binary (flood/non-flood) maps. Quantitative assessment was undertaken by means of a contingency table. An average accuracy rate (i.e. proportion of correct predictions, out of all test events) of 71.4% was achieved, with individual accuracy rates ranging from 57.1% to 78.6%). Further testing is needed to confirm initial findings and flood mapping refinement will be pursued.</p><p>The proposed model is fast, easy and relatively inexpensive to operate, making it suitable for direct use by local authorities who often lack the expertise on and/or capabilities for flood modelling and forecasting.</p><p><strong>References: </strong>Panziera et al. 2011. NORA–Nowcasting of Orographic Rainfall by means of Analogues. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. 137, 2106-2123.</p>

<p>A high-resolution rainfall data at a km and sub-hourly scales provides a powerful tool for hydrological risk assessment in the current and the future climate. Global circulation models or regional circulation models generally provide projections at much coarser space-time resolutions of 10-100 kilometres and daily to monthly. In the recent decade, convection-permitting models (CPM) have been developed and enable the projection at a kilometre and sub-hourly scales. CPMs, due to their very high computational demand, are still limited to a small number of ensemble simulations. This limits their skill in hydrology, where quantification of extremes and their variability is essential for risk assessment and design. In this project, we propose the combined use of CPMs with stochastic rainfall generators to simulate ensemble of climate change at hydrologically relevant scales.</p><p>To achieve this, we used the STREAP space-time stochastic rainfall generator, a 1 km resolution composite rain radar data and a 2.2km CPM dataset from the UK Met Office. For the mid-land region of the UK, we parameterised STREAP for the present climate using rainfall observations. CPM simulations were used to derive the change of STREAP parameters with a changing climate. These parameters describe the change in weather patterns, the rainfall intensification, and changes in the structure of rainfall. Our results show that by combining a physics-based model and a stochastic weather generator we can simulate robust ensemble of rainfall at a minimal computational cost while preserving all physical attributes from climate change projections.</p>