Flood Risk from Extreme Events
Programme background
Flood Risk from Extreme Events (FREE) is research to predict floods minutes to weeks and seasons to decades ahead.
The programme uses environmental science to investigate the physical processes involved in generating extreme events, so they can be better forecasted.
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.
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.
FREE brings researchers in the hydrological, meteorological, terrestrial and coastal oceanography communities together in an integrated research programme for the first time.
Flood risk problems
The programme is tackling three main flood risk problems.
Assessing
Assessing the probability, and associated risks, of extreme weather events causing flooding from minutes to weeks ahead.
Research will help improve our knowledge of:
- ensemble prediction methods
- what happens when models are scaled up or down
- what happens when outputs from models are aggregated or disaggregated, and how that affects our certainty when making forecasts
- the science that underpins warning systems
Understanding
Understanding how natural and human-caused climate change will alter the intensity and frequency of flooding, and associated weather regimes, over the next century.
The programme will investigate what limits our ability to predict flood risks seasons and decades ahead.
Developing
Developing integrated clouds-to-catchment-to-coast models to help predict floods.
A model of the coastal zone should involve river catchments, an urban conurbation, mixed land-use areas, an estuary and adjacent coastal-shelf ocean. The programme is investigating such modelling frameworks to help understand when floods will occur and how they can be forecasted. The programme will use the models to assess holistic flooding scenarios, such as when storm surges and heavy rainfall occur simultaneously. Clouds-to-catchment-to-coast models will be an important output from the programme, and will require good integration across the programme's research projects.
Interacting with other research
The programme's science will be compatible with, and will complement, an applied-research programme called Flood Risk Management Consortium, led by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with Defra, the Environment Agency, UK Water Industry Research and NERC.
The programme will also interact with the Joint Defra/Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management programme, the Met Office's research and development programmes, the DTI's Floods Foresight project, and the European Union's Framework 5 and Framework 6 initiatives.