From research to innovation Thomas Kjeldsen Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering University of Bath Workshop on flood estimation methods, May 7-8, Oslo • What are design floods needed for? • Historical developments • The Flood Estimation Handbook system • Successful dissemination Some large numbers £££ Average flood damage costs are currently £1.1 billion per year[1] Cost of summer 2007 flood was £3.2bn[2] In 2004, the total value of assets at risk of flooding was around £200 billion for England and Wales[3] Maintaining existing levels of flood defence would require spending on flood defences to increase to over £1 billion per year by 2035[4] (2013/14 £0.8Bn) [1] http://ukcp09.defra.gov.uk/ [2] Environment Agency, 2010 SC070039/R1 [3] National Audit Office, 2011, Flood Risk Management in England [4] Evans, E et al, 2004, Foresight Future Flooding. OST Indicative levels of competence and supervision for flood estimation staff (Environment Agency, 2009) Practising hydrologist Research hydrologist • Legal and cost constraints • Scientific discovery • Stability of recommendations • Challenge existing conventions • Hydrology one of many tasks • Exclusive focus on hydrology • Auditability of work • Publish academic papers “Looks like an interesting hobby you have, but what is the relevance of this?” Infrastructure manager in water company, 2012 Flood Studies Report (1975) • Linking flood frequency to catchment characteristics • Statistical method based on regions • Design rainfall model for UK • Event-based rainfall-runoff method “Although practising engineers will still require to exercise judgement and make decisions in their design for the control of floods the basic information on which such judgement depends is now available in the form of a comprehensive report and reliable data.” Sir Angus Paton (FRS), foreword to FSR report 2014 2008 2006 2007 2014 Long return period rainfall WS194/2/39 SC090031 Improved FEH statistical method SC050050 SC090031 ReFH model FD1913 SC040059 ReFH v2 New catchment descriptors FD1919 SC050050 HiFlows-UK v3.1.1 943 catchments Thoughts on successful dissemination • Guidance documents for technical end-users • Flexibility to apply a degree of engineering judgement and include recent significant events • Software: simple, transparent and robust (cheap…) • Establish route for dissemination of updates • Transparency in decision of best practice Things that did not go so well… • Data not easily available • Methods were too time consuming to apply • Nobody asked for this • Results too similar / too different from previous methods • Only tested on selected gauged site “You say the FEH methods work reasonably well across the UK, but how come they never work for my catchment?” EA hydrologist, 2011 Area 90 80 Are we measuring in the right places? Mean = 358 Median = 140 70 60 Count 50 40 30 • Note the log10 scale. • Flood Risk Management projects often require estimates for smaller catchments. • A similar story for URBEXT – we often tend to need flood estimates in more urbanised catchments. 20 10 0 0.01 0.1 1.0 10 Square kilometers 100 1000 10000 Area 16 14 Mean = 82 Median = 17 12 count 10 8 6 4 2 0 0.01 0.1 1.0 10 square kilometers 100 1000 10000