Developing surface water flood forecasting capabilities in Scotland: an operational pilot for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow

Speight, Linda; Cole, Steven J.; Moore, Robert J.; Pierce, Clive; Wright, Bruce; Golding, Brian; Cranston, Michael; Tavendale, Amy; Dhondia, Juzer; Ghimire, Sohan

doi:10.1111/jfr3.12281

Cited by 23 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(46 reference statements)

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“…Within the Natural Hazards Partnership (NHP; Hemingway & Gunawan, ), a real‐time Hazard Impact Model (HIM) framework has been developed that includes SWF as one of the hazards chosen for real‐time pre‐operational trials (Cole, Moore, Aldridge, Lane, & Laeger, ; Cole, Moore, Wells, et al, ; Speight et al, ). The SWF HIM system uses surface runoff estimates from the Grid‐to‐Grid (G2G) hydrological model (Bell, Kay, Jones, Moore, & Reynard, ; Moore, Cole, Bell, & Jones, ) to estimate the SWF hazard and links this to detailed inundation model outputs to assess impacts on property, people, transport, and infrastructure using a pre‐computed Impact Library (Aldridge, Gunawan, Moore, Cole, & Price, ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating potential future changes in surface water flooding hazard and impact

Rudd

Kay

Wells

et al. 2019

Hydrological Processes

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Surface water flooding (SWF) is a recurrent hazard that affects lives and livelihoods.Climate change is projected to change the frequency of extreme rainfall events that can lead to SWF. Increasingly, data from Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are being used to investigate the potential water-related impacts of climate change; such assessments often focus on broad-scale fluvial flooding and the use of coarse resolution (>12 km) RCMs. However, high-resolution (<4 km) convection-permitting RCMs are now becoming available that allow impact assessments of more localised SWF to be made.At the same time, there has been an increasing demand for more robust and timely real-time forecast and alert information on SWF. In the UK, a real-time SWF Hazard Impact Model framework has been developed. The system uses 1-km gridded surface runoff estimates from a hydrological model to simulate the SWF hazard. These are linked to detailed inundation model outputs through an Impact Library to assess impacts on property, people, transport, and infrastructure for four severity levels.Here, a set of high-resolution (1.5 km and 12 km) RCM data has been used as input to a grid-based hydrological model over southern Britain to simulate Current (1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009) and Future (~2100s; RCP8.5) surface runoff. Counts of thresholdexceedance for surface runoff and precipitation (at 1-, 3-and 6-hr durations) are analysed. Results show that the percentage increases in surface runoff extremes, are less than those of precipitation extremes. The higher-resolution RCM simulates the largest percentage increases, which occur in winter, and the winter exceedance counts are greater than summer exceedance counts. For property impacts, the largest percentage increases are also in winter; however, it is the 12-km RCM output that leads to the largest percentage increase in impacts. The added-value of highresolution climate model data for hydrological modelling is from capturing the more intense convective storms in surface runoff estimates. K E Y W O R D Sclimate change, hazard, impact, modelling, pluvial flooding, surface water flooding

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating potential future changes in surface water flooding hazard and impact

Rudd

Kay

Wells

et al. 2019

Hydrological Processes

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“…Recently, novel approaches have been developed and evaluated to map areas affected by SWFs [15] and to assess the exposure to these processes [5]. Moreover, first attempts have been made to develop early warning systems for SWF events [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. However, the development of such early warning systems is challenging.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing precipitation events leading to surface water flood damage over large regions of complex terrain

Bernet

Trefalt

Martius

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Surface water floods (SWFs) that lead to household losses are mainly localized phenomena. Research on describing the associated precipitation characteristics has previously been based on case studies and on the derivation of local rainfall thresholds, but no approaches have yet been presented on the national scale. Here, we propose a new way to overcome this scaling problem. We linked a gridded precipitation dataset based on both rainfall gauges and radar data with geolocated insurance claims for all of Switzerland. We show that the absolute thresholds vary markedly over complex terrain, and we thus propose basing early warning systems for predicting damage-relevant SWF events on local quantiles of maximum intensity and the total sum of event precipitation. A threshold model based on these two parameters is able to classify rainfall events potentially leading to damage-relevant SWF events over large areas of complex terrain, including high mountains and lowland areas, and a variety of geological conditions. Our approach is an important step towards the development of impact-based early warning systems. Weather warning agencies or insurance companies can build upon these findings to find workarounds for issuing user-targeted warnings at national scale or for nowcasting purposes.

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“…Future plans involve further investigation of flood projections, including using the RCM data applied here with a new modelling approach developed for surface water flood forecasting (Cole et al 2013) which was trialled operationally during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games Speight et al 2015). Rather than relying on exceedance of rainfall thresholds, as many existing pluvial flood warning systems do, the new approach uses gridded surface runoff estimates from the Grid-to-Grid model (Bell et al 2009), which is also used for operational fluvial flood forecasting in Britain (Price et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of very high resolution climate model data for hydrological modelling: baseline performance and future flood changes

et al. 2015

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193-208. 10.1007/s10584-015-1455-6 Contact CEH NORA team at noraceh@ceh.ac.ukThe NERC and CEH trademarks and logos ('the Trademarks') are registered trademarks of NERC in the UK and other countries, and may not be used without the prior written consent of the Trademark owner. AbstractIncreasingly, data from Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are used to drive hydrological models, to investigate the potential water-related impacts of climate change, particularly for flood and droughts. Generally, some form of further downscaling of RCM data has been required, but recently the first decadallength runs of very high resolution RCMs (with convection-permitting scales) have been performed. Here, a set of such runs for southern Britain has been used to drive a gridded hydrological model. Results using a 1.5km RCM nested in a 12km RCM driven by European-reanalysis boundary conditions show that the 1.5km RCM generally performs worse than the 12km RCM for simulating river flows in 32 example catchments. The clear spatial patterns of bias are consistent with bias patterns shown in the RCM precipitation data. Results using 1.5km and 12km RCM runs for the current climate and a potential future climate (driven by GCM boundary conditions) show clear differences in projected changes in flood peaks. The 1.5km RCM tends towards larger increases than the 12km RCM, particularly in spring and winter. If robust, this could have important consequences for adaptation planning under climate change, but further research is required, particularly given the greater biases in the baseline flow simulations driven by 1.5km RCM data, and the use of only a single short future climate projection.

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Developing surface water flood forecasting capabilities in Scotland: an operational pilot for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow

Cited by 23 publications

References 36 publications

Investigating potential future changes in surface water flooding hazard and impact

Investigating potential future changes in surface water flooding hazard and impact

Characterizing precipitation events leading to surface water flood damage over large regions of complex terrain

Use of very high resolution climate model data for hydrological modelling: baseline performance and future flood changes

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