Extreme rainfall and flood event recognition
This project investigated times of extreme rainfall from history to improve the guidance for flood forecasters on predicting when it might happen in the future.
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Details
This project addressed a need for better guidance for flood forecasters to be able to identify and predict times of extreme rainfall. It investigated times in history when extreme rainfall happened, how it happens and the types of weather circumstances that leads to these events. The project also examined how river catchments react to these rainfall patterns, both in terms of where they happen and over what time period.
Given that the average time between such events (the return period) could be many thousands of years. The project also considered what this means for estimating Probable Maximum Precipitation. A further requirement of this project was to create training data sets about extreme rainfall that can be used to test the models used in flood forecasting operations.
The project started in 2001 and was completed in 2002 at a cost of £60,000.