Author Archives: Richard

SINATRA: New NERC grant to understand flooding from intense rainfall

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The £2.7M SINATRA (Susceptibility of catchments to INTense RAinfall and flooding) Project, funded by NERC, the Environment Agency and the UK Met Office under the Flooding From Intense Rainfall thematic programme, will start later in 2013. This large consortium project is led by Dr Hannah Cloke at Reading University and deputy director Prof Hayley Fowler in CESER.

SINATRA assembles a multidisciplinary team of world-leading experts from academia (Reading University, Bristol University, Newcastle University (CESER, CeG and Geography), Exeter University, Hull University, King’s College London), industry (Halcrow and JBA), and government (UK Met Office (UKMO) and their joint Flood Forecasting Centre (with the Environment Agency), the British Geological Survey (BGS), the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) and the Cabinet Office’s Natural Hazards Partnership.)

SINATRA aims to advance scientific understanding of the drivers, thresholds, and impacts of flooding from intense rainfall in ‘at-risk’ UK catchments and to translate this small-scale process understanding into new open source model architectures and parameterisations to enable the development of decision-support tools, improving the capacity of forecasting agencies to deliver impacts-based warnings and predictions needed for managing Flooding From Intense Rainfall.

Contributions from CESER include expertise in crowd-sourcing (Dr Geoff Parkin and Mr David Alderson), hydrodynamic modelling (Dr Vedrana Kutija and Dr Qiuhua Liang), laser scanning (Dr Pauline Miller), atmospheric precursors (Prof Hayley Fowler and Dr Stephen Blenkinsop), historical flood reconstruction (Dr David Archer, visiting fellow), risk assessment (Prof Enda O’Connell, Dr John Ewen and Dr Greg O’Donnell) and rapid field response (Dr Andy Large and Prof Andy Russell, Geography).

The year Britain flooded

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Last night Channel 4 broadcast a programme on flooding in Britain in 2012. 

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-year-britain-flooded/4od

Much of the programme focussed on recent floods in the Northeast, where CESER researchers have been applying their expertise in urban flood modelling and data acquistion in Newcastle and other cities to look at the Toon Monsoon.

The programme also explored the sensitivity of slopes to extreme events, another area CESER have extensive experience – including their full scale test embankment.

CESER supports the EA in their new role coordinating the development of the UK’s climate predictions

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The UK Climate Projections (UKCP09), first developed in 2009, provide climate information designed to help those needing to plan how they will adapt to a changing climate. The data is focused on the UK, and is free of charge.

Past and current global greenhouse gas emissions mean that the world is already committed to some level of future climate change, so adaptation to address the resulting consequences is important. The Projections are presented for three different future scenarios representing High, Medium and Low greenhouse gas emissions.

No climate model can give a single definite answer to what the future will look like, instead the projections are based on the best available scientific evidence and understanding to help people to make sensible and informed decisions for the future.

In October 2011, the Environment Agency took over the management of UKCP09 as part of its Climate Ready support service. This role was previously provided by UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP). The Environment Agency is working in partnership with the Met Office Hadley Centre, British Atmospheric Data Centre and the Universities of Newcastle and East Anglia to provide a continuous service, including technical assistance through the UKCP09 Helpdesk.

Newcastle University’s Professor Chris Kilsby (Professor of Hydrology and Climate Change), supported by CESER academics, plays a key role “maintaining and enhancing the Weather Generator functionality of the projections and providing advice on future developments in climate scenarios for the UK”.

The Environment Agency’s Climate Ready support service provides advice and guidance to businesses, public sector and other organisations on adapting to a changing climate.  The aim is to increase the resilience to climate risks of organisations in key sectors across England.

CESER Research featured on BBC Radio 4 Today programme

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Prize winning research by CESER Director Richard Dawson (see article here) was featured on BBC Radio 4 in a short piece that remembers the 1953 flood event – 60 years on.

Professor Robert Nicholls, long time CESER collaborator and co-author of the research, describes some of the research and the difficulties associated with managing a dynamic coastline.

The featurette starts at 1:21:08-1:26:00 (with a later interview of 1953 survivors)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01q95ry/Today_31_01_2013/

Keynote speech at Futurs Urbains conference

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CESER Director, Richard Dawson, delivered a keynote speech at the international Futurs Urbains conference in Paris this week.  Richard delivered a talk that introduced CESER’s innovative Urban Integrated Assessment Facility and then reflected on lessons learned in London and Durban on the process of integrated modelling.  This included consideration of the technical challenges of modelling, the extent to which they meet policy needs, role of stakeholders in model development and application, barriers to their uptake and the value of and effort required for integration.

One key issue for teams embarking upon an integrated assessment must realise is that it does not provide all the answers or ‘design variables’ BUT it does stimulate the conversations and interactions that are needed to drive forward climate adaptation and mitigation agendas.

Although integrated assessment, in urban areas and elsewhere, comes at extra effort, Richard concluded that it was worthwhile – indeed essential for many of the world’s sustainability challenges because it enables teams to develop a collective understanding of policies concerning multiple pressures, urban functions and stakeholders.  Of course, there remain many challenges – not least transferability of these sophisticated modelling systems and communicating their results to wide audiences.

Better soil management is key to improving our resilience to extreme floods and droughts

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Dr Paul Quinn speaks to BBC Radio 4 about Newcastle University’s efforts to improve our resilience to the extreme weather events of 2012

Senior Lecturer in Catchment Hydrology and CESER researcher, Dr Paul Quinn was invited to take part in a special programme for BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today on extreme weather conditions in 2012. The programme aired on Jan 2nd, and is currently available via the BBC iPlayer.

Paul was involved, alongside Farming Consultant Lindsay Hargreaves and a number of farmers from across the country, to discuss their experiences and understanding of drought and floods last year, and consider what 2013 might bring. The unusually dry winter (in England and Wales) preceding Spring 2012 led to a severe drought in the first months of the year and the resulting hosepipe ban in March. Across the border in Scotland, however, was a very different situation, with 2011 being the wettest on record for 100 years and no signs of let up into 2012, where some parts actually received less than average rainfall for the latter part of the year!

In England, the hosepipe ban became a somewhat ironic prelude to what turned out to be the wettest summer since records began, and the accompanying cold temperatures alongside the sheer amount and longevity of rainfall completely devastated crops nationwide including cereals, potatoes and fruit. Individual farmers speaking on the BBC programme reported losses of between 15% (potatoes) to 90% (apples) on the previous year, not to mention the knock-on effects of such a late, low quality harvest; namely barns full of grain blocking cattle coming in for winter and further wet/icy conditions making removal of that grain impossible.

The solution for farmers to such extreme weather (which we know under conditions of climate change will most likely increase), is better soil management, according to Paul. He explains that our soil is generally in a poor state, so does not store as much water as it used to. This is due to overuse and the fact that modern farming practices often don’t allow the soil to function properly. Paul, alongside other members of CESER and the NIReS Terrestrial Theme at Newcastle University, believe that it is possible to create a climate resilient landscape that results in positive relationships between food production, soil and water management, biodiversity and habitat protection, pollution reduction and even carbon storage. This requires collaboration between specialists in different fields (pardon the pun!), something which is being made possible through CESER and the NIReS Terrestrial Theme, and will result in more opportunities for research into catchments and landscapes with multiple functions that are more resilient to the changes in climate that we are witnessing in the UK but also globally, as described on the programme.

 

New analysis of London’s urban heat island

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New work by CESER researchers has demonstrated how a long temporal baseline of daytime AVHRR data can be employed to capture the summer temperature regime of the city of London, UK, including the response to a known heatwave event.

AVHRR scene of estimated surface temperature (EST) of Greater London, 8 August 2003, 14:04 (GMT), showing the location of London weather stations employed in the study and the rural reference site relative to London.

Analysis of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data for London shows the high degree of spatial variability of intensity of urban heat across London. Furthermore, it is highly sensitive to local meteorological effects and daily cycles.

Comparison of the Urban Heat Island Intensity (UHII) [the maximum difference between urban and rural temperatures during one day] in a statistically robust manner showed that the 2003 heatwave UHII data sets for both image surface and ground air temperatures did not exhibit significantly greater intensities than the other years under consideration.  This is in contrast to other work on this topic (e.g. Cheval et al., 2009; Tomlinson et al., 2010) that indicates that not only is the UHII metric a relatively poor means by which to distinguish between a heatwave summer in London, but also the need for further scrutiny of the use of the UHII.

The full paper can be downloaded by following the link:
Holderness, T., Barr, S.L., Dawson, R.J. and Hall, J.W. (2013) An evaluation of thermal Earth observation for characterising urban heatwave event dynamics using the urban heat island intensity metric, Int. J. Remote Sensing, 34(3):864–884

Please contact Stuart Barr for more information.

Seminar on Urban Futures: Professor Chris Rogers from the University of Birmingham

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Professor Chris Rogers will give a seminar at 1-2pm on Tuesday 8th January, in Devonshire G21/22.

Chris will speak about “Future Proofing our Urban Design Decisions – the Urban Futures Methodology”
which summarises his work on the EPSRC funded Urban Futures programme. This work has been developed to help urban designers analyse the resiliency of their sustainability solutions – the things they are doing today in the name of sustainability, such as incorporating greywater recycling into a housing development or cycle paths across a city.

Professor Chris Rogers is the Director of the Birmingham Centre for Resilience Research and Education at the University of Birmingham.

This seminar is organised by CESER in conjunction with the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies.

Supersized Earth

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The 1200km Shahe Aqueduct in China - from the BBC website

Readers of this blog may be interested in the BBC’s Supersized Earth which you can watch on iPlayer.

The three episodes explore a few aspects of how humanity has being “redesigning” planet Earth to build the modern world.

The parallels with the philosophy behind aspects of the CESER research programme and the wider Earth Systems Engineering philosophy are extremely clear.  Although there is some amazing cinematography and the presenter covers some interesting ground I couldn’t help feeling it was a rather one sided take on the sustainability challenge – look how we’ve turned the desert into farms etc. and almost no consideration of the implications of waste, resource use, chemicals required and so on.  As anyone familiar with our research programme will know these issues are of course highly complex – but if we do not seek to communicate, understand and address them a truly sustainable future seems unlikely, regardless of our technological feats.

But please make your own mind up…

CESER research nominated for INDEX: Design to improve life award

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CESER research has been nominated for the prestigious INDEX: Design to improve life award.

INDEX: Design to Improve Life® is a Danish NPO with global reach, established in 2002. Their mission is to Inspire, Educate and Engage people in using Design to Improve Life-skills to develop sustainable solutions to global and local challenges.  The INDEX award is widely recognized as the most important design award in the world.