From drought to floods in 2012: operations and early warning services in the UK

The Flood Forecasting Centre (FFC) is a partnership between the UK Met Office and the Environment Agency, established in 2009 to provide an operational early warning system for flood risk across England and Wales. It was set up following the summer 2007 floods in England and Wales, and the subsequent recommendations of the Pitt Review, to provide longer lead times for flooding. Since 2011, the FFC has delivered its 24/7 forecasting service from the Operations Centre at the Met Office in Exeter, primarily for the emergency response community. The FFC provides forecasts for all sources of flooding, namely fluvial, coastal, surface water and groundwater. Recent examples, most notably from the 2012 floods, are presented. Following the success of the FFC, the Environment Agency, Met Office and partner organisations have extended the methodology and services under the Natural Hazard Partnership

Operational use of a grid-based model for flood forecasting

Following the summer 2007 floods in England and Wales, a new context for flood forecasting emerged through the recommendations set out in the Pitt review. This paper presents the operational challenges being addressed by the Flood Forecasting Centre (FFC) – a joint venture between the Environment Agency (EA) and the Met Office (MO) – to deliver forecasts of flood risk across England and Wales with longer lead times (out to 5 days ahead) and, on a shorter timescale, for rapid response catchments. These are both key recommendations of the Pitt review. As a joint venture, the FFC is uniquely placed to meet these objectives and, as a first step, has implemented a distributed hydrological model, grid-to-grid (G2G), calibrated across England and Wales, on the EA's national flood forecasting system. Also fundamental to successfully meeting these objectives is the FFC's ability to utilise the latest MO advances in high-resolution numerical weather prediction and nowcasting of rainfall, including forecasts in probabilistic form. Early results from applying the model to the Cumbria floods of November 2009 demonstrate that this is an effective approach for generating longer lead-time flood forecasts. The results also illustrate that this methodology is best used in combination with current regionally based flood forecasting tools

Representing the spatial variability of rainfall for input to the G2G distributed flood forecasting model: operational experience from the Flood Forecasting Centre

Over the year 2010 the Flood Forecasting Centre (FFC) calibrated and implemented a distributed flood forecasting model to support the FFC’s remit to provide flood risk forecasts across England and Wales, UK. The distributed nature of the model, designed to run at 15-min time-steps on a 1 km2 grid, enables the spatial variability of rainfall measurements and forecasts, rather than lumped catchment averages, to be captured. Such a distributed model should therefore benefit greatly from the spatial and temporal resolution afforded by radar observations. Initial results have highlighted the importance of the quality of the gridded rainfall fields and in a number of cases erroneous radar rainfall data have been shown to contribute to poor model performance. It is suggested that gridded datasets of sufficient quality will be best provided by capturing the spatial variability inherent in radar data together with raingauge data in a merged product

The future of flood hydrology in the UK

A ‘roadmap’ for the future of UK flood hydrology over the next 25 years has been published, based on a wide-ranging and inclusive co-creation process involving more than 270 individuals and 50 organisations from different sectors and disciplines. This paper highlights key features of the roadmap and its development as a community-owned initiative. The roadmap's relationship with hydrological research and practice is discussed, as is its context within the wider flood risk management innovation landscape, including funding. While the paper has a focus on UK flood hydrology, reflecting the scope of the roadmap, it is also considered in the context of advances in hydrology internationally