Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE)

The broad programme objectives embody consideration of the meteorological, hydrological and coastal oceanographic processes involved. Such processes include floods arising either through the occurrence of extreme rainfall and subsequent flows underground, overland or in river channels to the sea, or within estuaries and sea areas generated from storm surges around our coast. These components were highlighted by major flood events during the summer of 2007 in Tewkesbury and Gloucester, and the 9th November 2007 North Sea storm surge which so nearly spelt disaster for east coast communities.

Climate change will probably bring more frequent and intense storms to the UK, in turn bringing more floods. At present, flood damage costs the UK about £1bn each year. So it's essential we improve our ability to forecast, quantify and manage flood risks, and mitigate the effects of climate variability and change, if we're to maintain a sustainable economy. Sound environmental science must underpin our efforts.

FREE brings researchers in the hydrological, meteorological, terrestrial and coastal oceanography communities together in an integrated research programme for the first time.

FREE Mission Statement:

To reduce the flood risk in the UK from extreme events

The FREE programme will research what causes and propagates floods, so helping to forecast and quantify flood risk, and inform our society about the likely effects of climate change.

The FREE programme started in 2005 and will end in 2010. There have been three rounds of awards, through which 13 projects have been funded.

• Funding Round 1:
  • Changing coastlines: data assimilation for morphodynamic prediction and predictability - Dr Sarah Dance, University of Reading.
  • Coastal Flooding by Extreme Events (CoFEE) - Prof J Williams, University of Plymouth.
  • Ensemble Prediction of Inundation Risk and Uncertainty arising from Scour (EPIRUS) - Dr Q Zou, University of Plymouth.
  • Exploitation of new data sources, data assimilation and ensemble techniques for storm and flood forecasting - Prof AJ Illingworth, University of Reading.
  • FRACAS: a next generation national Flood Risk Assessment under climate ChAnge Scenarios - Mr N Reynard, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
  • Identification of changing precipitation extremes and attribution to atmospheric, oceanic and climatic changes - Dr TJ Osborn, University of East Anglia.
  • Local flood forecasting capability for fluvial and estuarine floods: Use of GridStix for constraining uncertainty in predictive models - Prof Keith Beven, Lancaster University.
  • Modelling groundwater flood risk in the Chalk aquifer from future extreme rainfall events - Prof H Wheater, Imperial College London.
  • Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions- Dr PE McSharry, University of Oxford.
  • Uncertainty Assessments of Flood Inundation Impacts: Using spatial climate change scenarios to drive ensembles of distributed models for extremes - Prof GR McGregor, King's College London.

• Funding Round 2:
  • A data-driven exploratory study of extreme events based on joint probability analysis - Dr C Svensson, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
  • Land Use Management Effects in Extreme Floods - Professor PE Oconnell, Newcastle University.

• Funding Round 3:
  • A hybrid model for predicting the probablity of very extreme rainfall - Professor R Toumi, Imperial College London.

A further objective of the FREE programme is to collect data from extreme events occurring during the programme. An Arrangement known as FLood Action Team (FLoAT), led by Dr Stuart Lane, Durham University, is also in place to assemble specific data should major extreme events occur during the programme as happened during 2007 (Tewkesbury - acquisition of aerial images collected during the Tewkesbury flooding summer 2007).

Due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the projects within FREE, no one NERC data centre is an appropriate archive for all data. Data management for FREE will be coordinated by the BADC and data and metadata will be stored at the data centre most appropriate for the data type: atmospheric data at BADC, marine data at BODC and hydrological data at CEH. Some data may be more appropriately archived at the NEODC (NERC Earth Observation Data Centre), however this will be administered through the BADC. Links to all data locations will be added to the FREE project page as they become available.

Regardless of the physical location of the data, a copy of the metadata will be lodged in the BADC catalogue and will be browsable through a common portal at BADC which will also link to the actual data location.

Access to the data generated by each project at BADC will be restricted to the FREE participants during a restricted access period ending two years after the end date of the programme. Data will be made publicly accessible after that date.

Documentation

• List of projects funded under the FREE programme.
• FREE Science Plan
• FREE Implementation Plan (January 2008)
• FREE Progress Report (May 2008)
• FREE Progress Report (Oct 2008)
• Data Inputs to FREE projects

Links and References

• National Environment Research Council (NERC)
• British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC)
• NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

A list of relevant publications is available.

Who to contact

• The Programme Science Coordinator is Prof. Chris Collier (Salford University).
• Any query regarding the data should be sent to the BADC help desk.