Building resilience for the future

By assessing the risks posed by environmental hazards, we help partners to predict and develop strategies to address the threats they pose to society, the economy and the environment. Our capabilities in this area include:

• Flood and rainfall estimation data and methods help partners understand flood risk, and support flood  management decision-making.
• Hydrological modelling under different climate change and socio-economic scenarios is used to support the development of adaptation policies and wider decision-making under climate change.

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Our flood estimation expertise, the result of many years of hydrological monitoring, modelling and analysis, has been a primary focus of UKCEH and its predecessor organisations for more than 40 years. Building on the ground-breaking Flood Studies Report (1975) and Flood Estimation Handbook (1999), our flood estimation research improves the  accuracy and reliability of flood frequency estimates in the UK.

The FEH Web Service delivers the catchment data and rainfall model outputs that are required to apply the industry-standard methods for assessing flood risk in the UK. The FEH also provides guidance, data, standard procedures and  software for rainfall and river flood frequency. It now includes the estimation of development site runoff rates across the UK.

FEH data and methods support:

• Flood risk mapping and assessment
• Flood management planning
• Design of structures such as bridges, culverts and reservoir spillways
• Assessment of the rarity of notable rainfalls or floods
• Design of sustainable and traditional drainage systems.

Using the latest climate change projections from the UK Climate Impact Programme, including the UKCP09  probabilistic climate projections from the Met Office Hadley Centre, UKCEH along with the British Geological Survey
and Wallingford HydroSolutions developed two unique datasets for Great Britain:

• An 11-member ensemble 1km gridded projection time series (1950-2098) of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration for Great Britain
• A corresponding time-series of projected daily river flow and monthly groundwater levels for 282 rivers and 24 boreholes.

The Future Flows and Groundwater Levels dataset has been used extensively in the water industry and has found a wide  range of applications across other sectors such as farming, energy, and transport, and in research. With the recent  release of UKCP18 projections, UKCEH and its partner organisations have been commissioned by UK Government to deliver a new, nationally consistent, ‘enhanced Future Flows and Groundwater’ dataset and associated climate service (EFLaG) based on UKCP18.

More about UK Future Flows maps and datasets >

Monsoon-related flooding occurs annually in the Godavari and Krishna river basins in Peninsular India, causing damage and disruption to local communities. UKCEH has worked with partners in Maharashtra State to apply some of the  principles of the Flood Estimation Handbook to Indian catchments so that spatially consistent estimates such as the 50-year flood can be derived for any point on the river network.

Based on the results of this study, we are developing a web application for users in academia, industry and policy to  illustrate flood frequency estimates for gauged catchments in the region, as well as simple statistics of trend at these  stations, accessible in a simple point-and-click format. The application makes use of open-source global datasets that  complement those used in the FEH methodology.

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UKCEH scientists are supporting the Australian Government to generate Great Barrier Reef “Report Cards”. These report cards summarise the condition of the marine environment, detecting changes in the environment that occur in response to various pressures and management actions.

To achieve this, UK and Australian scientists have deployed hydrological models to produce historical simulations,  hindcasts, nowcasts and three-day forecasts of water discharges from the land into the Great Barrier Reef marine environment.

This collaboration between UKCEH and the Bureau of Meteorology Australia is part of the eReefs Programme, which is focused on the protection and preservation of the Great Barrier Reef.

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In Malaysia, with funding from the Newton Programme in South East Asia, we are working with in-country partners to  develop our understanding of flood exposure and vulnerability from local to national scales, to support improved quantification of the flood hazard and subsequent flood management, response and recovery.

We are also leading an integration project within this Programme looking at extreme weather, flooding, landslides and water-borne diseases. The aim is to share data and knowledge among stakeholders, and to initiate consideration of a multi-hazard approach to risk management in Malaysia.

More about our work to understand flood impacts across scales >

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Through the STAR project, supported by the Newton Fund, UKCEH scientists are working in collaboration with Thai partners to enhance resilience to drought in the country.

We are delivering new information and insights about the relationships between drought severity, timing and duration, and the corresponding impacts on Thai agriculture. We are also producing guidance on how drought risk can be better communicated from policy planners to farmers, thereby increasing the resilience of agriculture.

The project is increasing Thailand’s capacity for drought monitoring and early warning. Different ministerial bodies and  institutions related to agricultural water management are directly involved in the design and delivery of the project and will benefit from its outputs.

STAR project website >

In many parts of the world, human management of river systems is essential in providing water needed for agriculture, industry and public supply. However, management activities such as reservoir operations and abstractions for irrigation water are not represented in many hydrological and land surface models, which limits the applicability of these models in densely populated and highly managed parts of the world.

As part of the Climate Science for Service Partnership Brazil (CSSP Brazil) research, we included a detailed treatment of  water management in the JULES land surface model, and used this to study historical water availability in Brazil. The new model accounts both for water demands from multiple sectors and impounding reservoir operations, and so is able to  identify key areas and times of water scarcity.

The system was designed with portability in mind and uses simple  management rules that can be amended where
better, local information exists, providing a tool that can be applied in many settings around the world.

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UKCEH’s GWAVA (Global Water Availability Assessment) model provides integrated analysis of water sources and  demands at national to continental scales. It helps stakeholders understand how competing water demands and future  hydro-climatological changes might impact water stress at different scales.

GWAVA combines locally sourced data with global databases to give projections of future changes to water availability. These projections are used to model potential impacts, including changes to water quality and damage to river  ecosystems.

GWAVA is highly adaptable to environments where hydrological data are sparse and has been successfully applied both globally and at continental and basin scales across Europe, Africa and Asia for more than 20 years.

GWAVA model >