Newcastle hosted the British Hydrological Society’s national meeting in September 2012, reported initially by Dr Claire Walsh for the BHS magazine “Circulation”.
Ironically, this national meeting was held the day after the third pluvial flooding event that Newcastle had witnessed since the end of June 2012. Despite substantial flooding elsewhere in the country affecting both speakers and delegates, an informative and lively meeting still went ahead.
Newcastle City Council’s John Robinson, who has responsibility for surface water flooding in the organisation, and was kept very busy the day before the meeting, gave one of the opening talks. John focussed on the ‘super cell’ event that extensively affected Newcastle upon Tyne on 28 June 2012. The event, which was between a 1 in 100 and 120 year event impacted homes, businesses, roads, light and mainline rail. Newcastle University and NIReS Water Theme researchers Prof Chris Kilsby, Dr Stephen Blenkinsop and Dr Vedrana Kutija also gave presentations during the meeting.
Chris described the advances that have been made to the UK Climate Change Projections 2009 (UKCP09) Weather Generator. The latest urban Weather Generator provides realistic rainfall, temperature and potential evapotranspiration data for cities and regions and incorporates sources of man-made heat. Chris outlined some of the remaining limitations of climate models, namely that they do not provide information on less than daily rainfall and they use fixed relationships of hourly to daily rainfall, which are likely to change in future.
Stephen outlined a new NERC-funded project, ‘Quantifying Robust Changes in Extreme Precipitation: CONVEX’, which will assess the potential of high resolution climate models to reproduce intense rainfall as well as addressing some of the other current deficiencies of Regional Climate Models. The project will further our understanding of extreme rainfall events whilst looking at better ways to model and predict their impacts. The difficulties of model parameterisation in simulating extreme rainfall will be addressed, and the team ultimately intend to provide new seasonal estimates of change to extreme rainfall to help inform future flood adaptation strategies.
Testing of such adaptation strategies is a capability of the City Cat Analysis Tool (CityCAT), as Vedrana explained. CityCAT is unique software tool for modelling, analysing and visualising surface water flooding. It enables rapid assessment of combined pluvial (rainfall related) and fluvial (river related) flood risk and the effects of different flood alleviation measures, which Vedrana was able to demonstrate in real time. The capability of the model is such that different features, e.g. roof storage and permeable surfaces, can be added in order to test their effectiveness. Following recent flood events, photographs and eye witness accounts have provided valuable validation of the modelled results.
Researchers from Newcastle University continue to work with BHS colleagues and local stakeholders on issues such as flood forecasting, modelling and alleviation. For more information, see the NIReS Water Theme pages.
published on: 10th December 2012