Luis Felipe Duque
Hydrological response of catchments at a local scale.
Project title
Assessment of decision-making processes in flood warning performance
Supervisors
- Professor Enda O'Connell
- Dr Greg O'Donnell
- Professor Qiuhua Liang
Project description
Climate change and intense urbanisation of flood-prone areas has altered the hydrological response of catchments. This has increased the frequency and size of floods in countries with low standards of protection. Flood forecasting, warning, and response systems (FFWRSs) have been widely used to improve resilience to this natural hazard. They act as complementary non-structural mitigation measures.
Flood warning science is a new scientific discipline. It addresses the need to assess, research, and improve the process chain in these systems. This has brought about remarkable advancements in flood warning performance. But very little work has been done to assess the use of density forecasts as a measure of forecast uncertainty in flood-warning decision-making procedures. This measure can affect the flood warning performance in social and technical terms.
Luis's research will build a comprehensive model to explore this issue at local scale. He will investigate technical and social flood warning performance measures.
The framework will consider probabilistic forecasts of fluvial and pluvial floods. It will allow exploration of the relationship between different approaches used to represent decision-making procedures and flood warning performance measures. Luis will compare the results with those obtained by deterministic forecasts commonly used in FFWRSs.
The research will provide insight into the effects of including decision-making procedures when quantifying flood warning performance. It will also provide insight into the benefits of using different types of forecasting information in FFWRSs. This will result in a useful research product for flood managers and scholars.