Challenges in flood forecasting

Abstract

There are many sources of uncertainty in a flood forecast that impact on the overall performance of the Flood Forecasting and Warning service. This talk will outline the steps the Environment Agency is taking to quantify performance of that service both for planning prior to a flood event and when a forecast is being used to issue Flood Warnings to individual communities. It will go on to describe how a Flood Forecast for Flood Warning standard is being applied to the three elements of the flood forecast chain: 1) the model and its condition; 2) performance of the model with real-time data inputs and 3) the forecast given by the duty officer, based on a combination of the model output and their expertise. Finally, consideration will be given to how the standard and performance information could be used to support the use of ensemble data in order to communicate flood risk and better understand where the greatest uncertainty in our flood forecast is when they are used to support the issuing of Flood Warnings.

All welcome. Refreshments available from 18.00. To find venue, go to: http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/contact/find-us/