Dr. Steven Cole

Steven heads the Hydrological Forecasting Group at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH). He has experience of leading collaborative hydrometeorological research projects, in partnership with stakeholders, which deliver new and lasting capability to decision-makers. He is a specialist in the real-time forecasting of fluvial and pluvial (surface water) flooding, including impacts, and gridded estimation of rainfall using raingauges and/or weather radar.

Steven is a lead developer of the UKCEH Grid-to-Grid (G2G) distributed area-wide hydrological forecasting model and supported its implementation across Britain for the Flood Forecasting Centre and Scottish Flood Forecasting Service. This has included developing probabilistic flood forecasting approaches and investigating their application to Rapid Response Catchments that are often ungauged, verification of ensemble forecast systems and reviewing approaches for snowmelt forecasting.

Steven leads hydro-meteorological research tasks under NERC National Capability projects Hydro-JULES and International Science for Net Zero Plus, and many externally funded projects including applying G2G to support improved management of the Great Barrier Reef under the eReefs programme, developing a Flood Hazard Impact Model for India under the Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership India (WCSSP India), and Strategies and Tools for Resilience of Buried Infrastructure to Meteorological Shocks (STORMS) under the DAFNI programme.

Steven has pioneered real-time flood impact and risk forecasting at national, regional and local scales. He helped develop the award-winning surface water flood forecasting pilot system for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and the subsequent Surface Water Flooding Hazard Impact Model (SWF HIM) used across England and Wales by the Flood Forecasting Centre. He has recently led development of the PREDICTOR (PREDICTing flooding impacts from cOnvective Rainfall) for SEPA and the NFLICS (Nowcasting of FLood Impacts from Convective Storms in the Sahel) projects, delivering real-time portals for operational forecasters.