Water resources modelling

Global hydrological variability poses one of the greatest challenges and threats to the world’s population. Our scientists develop hydrological models for flood, drought and water resource management and enable a wide range of stakeholders nationally and internationally to apply them to make communities safer and more resilient.

We have expertise in:

• Flood and drought forecasting
• Modelling at national and local scales using spatial landscape property datasets
• Data assimilation
• Uncertainty estimation
• Comparative model performance assessment
• Real-time hazard and impact forecasting
• Spatial rainfall estimation using rain gauge and weather radar data.

JULES (Joint UK Land Environment Simulator) is the land surface model used by the UK’s Met Office to forecast  weather and climate. JULES was developed by a wide community of UK researchers, coordinated by UKCEH and the Met Office.

The Hydro-JULES model builds on JULES to represent an integrated water cycle model that will improve climate change projections, enhance flood prediction, help ensure water availability, and enable us to better understand the impact of the changing water cycle on nature and people’s livelihoods. The new model brings together approaches from meteorology  and hydrology, integrating data on rivers, rainfall, coastal and groundwater, and amalgamating data from different sources, for example satellite and field instrument data.

The programme is funded by NERC and delivered in partnership with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and  the British Geological Survey.

Hydro-JULES website >

The Cauvery river basin in southern India has long presented water management challenges at local, regional and  basin scales.

A team of scientists from six organisations in India and the UK, jointly led by UKCEH and the Indian Institute of Science, set out to assess how the many local, small-scale water management interventions in rural and urban areas affected water resources availability across the entire basin. A detailed study of interventions (e.g. reservoirs, check dams, tanks, borewells, etc.) in both settings informed the set-up of UKCEH’s basin-scale water resources system model, GWAVA.

The model was calibrated and validated using data from national, state and municipal authorities. Initial output provided a  useful perspective on the influence of interventions on the current water situation. The model’s subsequent application, with a combination of climate- and socio-economic-scenarios (RCPs & SSPs), showed how water availability might  change over coming decades.

This work, funded by NERC and India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, should contribute in future to a fair and equitable  allocation of water resources across the basin.