Category Archives: News

BHS National Meeting: Hydrological challenges and emerging solutions in urban areas

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Hydrological challenges and emerging solutions in urban areas

Wednesday 26th September 2012, 1000-1630

Darwin Suite, Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne

This meeting will bring together scientists, engineers, water managers, regulators, consultants and policy-makers to discuss these issues. Speakers include: David Balmforth, ICE; John Robinson, Newcastle City Council; Chris Kilsby, Newcastle University; Vedrana Kutija, Newcastle University; Lynne Jack, Heriot-Watt University; Brighid Ó Dochartaigh, British Geological Survey and Fayyaz Memon, Exeter University.

Register at: http://www.hydrology.org.uk/meetings_events.asp or contact claire.walsh@ncl.ac.uk


 

Stilt House: urban art installation project

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STILT HOUSE is a Fine Art led interdisciplinary research project involving Art, Architecture and Civil Engineering.

The engagement of artists with complex issues such as climate change presents both opportunities, and inherent contradictions, relating to the symbolic, creative and material characteristics of art, and issues of public understanding of the representation of science and intervention and communication through an artistic viewpoint. Importantly, such artworks can place an emphasis on environmental issues experienced both materially and conceptually within local and global contexts. This provides the possibility to influence the public’s attitudes and behaviours in arenas beyond those of the traditional domains of scientists, engineers and city planners.

STILT HOUSE is a site-specific artwork consisting of two interconnected structures that are made from recycled plastic waste, exhibited as part of HubtoHub, Archifest 2011 in Singapore. Sited at Dhoby Ghaut Green the architectural installation offers, through it’s perforated black walls, an elevated and translucent perspective on the surrounding land and cityscape. By reinterpreting this traditional stilt housing typology, which was originally made from sustainable local materials and was ecologically adapted to the specific climate and landscape, STILT HOUSE encourages us to rethink our relationship with the environment we inhabit. It also confronts us with the debris of our consumer society in the unexpected form of an innovative building material that translates waste into new productive and aesthetic uses.

Website: http://www.hubtohub.sg/exhibition.html#team-DhobyGhautGreen

STILT HOUSE was created by Prof Wolfgang Weileder (Fine Art, Newcastle University), in collaboration with Prof Simon Guy (Manchester Architecture Research Institute) and CESER Researcher Dr Oliver Heidrich (Civil Engineering, Newcastle University).

Prof Simon Guy and CESER Researcher Dr Oliver Heidrich are currently writing a paper on the project addressing the following questions:

  • Can urban art installations both represent and intervene in issues of climate change/sustainability through their selection of materials?
  • Does the answer have anything useful to contribute towards discussions of sustainable cities?

Establishing a long term urban research facility

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Urban areas are complex systems, comprising many interacting infrastructure sectors. Understanding these inter-relationships is essential to sustainable urban and infrastructure development. Research focused on single sectors, or over limited timescales, will inevitably fail to capture these interdependencies and dynamics.

‘Long Term Ecological Research‘ in the USA has over 30 years monitored a wide range of species, habitat types etc. to develop a richer understanding of the ecological system as a whole and consequently how it might respond to stresses such as climate change. Inspired by this, and funded by an EPSRC New Directions grant, we will establish a unique ‘Long Term Urban Research’ programme that will deliver the evidence basis for sustainable infrastructure investment in urban areas.

Our ‘Long Term Urban Research’ programme will apply engineering principles at a city-scale. The facility will monitor a range of infrastructures and sectors (e.g. water, earthworks, transport, climate, waste etc.), interactions between sectors and the phenomena only observable at the system scale (such as the urban heat island). The work will be based in Newcastle and develop:

  • Long-term datasets generated by using multiple methodologies (including a new array of hundreds of sensors and other monitoring equipment) that will observe phenomena at the individual, building, campus through to city-wide and regional scales.
  • Informatics for managing, archiving and accessing real-time, remotely sensed and qualitative data.
  • Simulation models and qualitative interpretation that use this new data to better understand cities, infrastructure systems and urban activity.
The facility will bring together new and existing data that includes the urban climate (temperature, rainfall, humidity etc.), air quality, pedestrian and traffic flows and hydraulic flows. The sectoral breadth and spatial resolution of coverage will provide a globally unique monitoring facility.

Caribbean Weather Generator project

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Researchers in the school have been awarded a two year project to address weather related climate change hazards and impacts for the Caribbean region.

Managers and policy makers in the Caribbean require knowledge of the likely impacts and hazards arising from climate change that are specific to their geographical location and that are relevant to their planning time-horizons (e.g. the short term (2030s) and the longer term (2080s)). However, current climate model projections of the weather are of limited use in this respect due to scale and bias issues. A web service will be developed to address this need through the adaptation and provision of leading weather-generator models from the EARWIG [1] and the UKCIP09 [2] climate knowledge systems. These weather generator models will be used to provide locally relevant weather projections based on the best available observed data and climate model outputs for the region.

Preliminary use of the new web service will be for impacts studies and training programs with stakeholders. This will feed through to management decisions and policy developed to address the specific hazards and impacts of climate change on the region.

The project is funded by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and work will be carried out in partnership with the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (Belize), University of East Anglia, University of the West Indies and the Institute of Meteorology (Cuba).

References

1 Kilsby, C.G., Jones, P.D., Burton, A., Ford, A.C., Fowler, H.J., Harpham, C., James, P., Smith, A. and Wilby, R.L. 2007. A daily weather generator for use in climate change studies. Environmental Modelling and
Software, 22, 1705-1719.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ceg/research/publication/39922

2 Jones, P.D., Kilsby, C.G., Harpham, C., Glenis, V., and Burton, A., 2009. UK Climate Projections science report: Projections of future daily climate for the UK from the Weather Generator. University of Newcastle,
UK. ISBN 978-1-906360-06-1,
http://ukclimateprojections.defra.gov.uk

Help us with the ‘Toon Monsoon’ Flood project

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Lightning strikes the Tyne Bridge. Picture taken from video by Marc Burton.

The School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University is conducting a study of the flash-flooding that hit Newcastle and the North East on June 28th, 2012. They aim to gather as much information as possible from photos, eye witness reports and measurements to help them to understand the extent of the flooding around the region, its impacts and how to improve the resilience of the city and its infrastructure to similar events in future. The study is being carried out by internationally leading research groups in flood risk and urban drainage, as well in transport operations.

A web site has been set up to allow people to upload their photos and comments on a map: this can be accessed at: http://ceg-morpethflood.ncl.ac.uk/toonflood. This follows on from a similar study carried out after the Morpeth flood of 2008 where valuable lessons were learned and are being put into practice with collaborators in government and industry.