Abstract
AbstractDuring surface water flooding events, emergency responders require detailed information on the risks posed in order to provide an appropriate and effective response. Few early warning systems quantitatively estimate the risk and impacts of surface water flooding. Improvements in computational processing capability, availability of new datasets and developments in forecasting models means that the forecasting information currently being supplied by the Flood Forecasting Centre can be improved upon through the application of a timely, impact‐based model. This article presents a novel approach to collating receptor datasets into a pre‐calculated Impact Library for use in a Hazard Impact Model (HIM) that will operate using real‐time probabilistic rainfall and surface runoff forecasts for England and Wales. The HIM provides an approach suitable for modelling flood impacts. Initial results are presented for a case study covering the 2012 floods in the North East of England. Information generated by the HIM provides additional benefits beyond current methods. Features include operator access to 1 km 15 min spatial–temporal data, analysis of individual impact criteria and modular refinement of the Impact Library to suit different situations. The HIM has been developed in partnership via the Natural Hazards Partnership.
Highlights
There is growing demand for improved risk-based surface water flooding (SWF) warning systems
Processing of the data was undertaken using ArcGIS and MapInfo and the results summarised for each 1 km cell in the study area
For the results presented here, p was assigned a value of 1, which reflects the 99th centile of the reporting area
Summary
There is growing demand for improved risk-based surface water flooding (SWF) warning systems. The approach takes advantage of new datasets and recent developments in numerical weather prediction, hydrological modelling and probabilistic forecasting to provide more targeted flood impact and risk information. To aid rapid assessment of flood risk information produced by the SWF HIM and allow comparison of different impact criteria, impact severity metrics were standardised. A disjunctive Multi-Criteria Analysis approach (Meyer, Haase, & Scheuer, 2007) was adopted for combining impact severity levels from the different criteria This has similarities with the single threshold hotspot method proposed for local flood risk assessment by the Environment Agency (2014a). The x-axis is determined by the given hazard severity This reporting area risk forecast can inform the assessment undertaken by the FFC in the surface water flood risk guidance provided in the FGS. The highest level of risk attained is used to represent the overall flood risk assigned (Figure 1)
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