National analysis of rapid rates of rise (“flash floods”) in gauged river flows

“York flooding” by Daniel Birch licensed under CC BY 2.0

As part of our support for the Flooding From Intense Rainfall research programme, we have been working on identifying exceptional “rapid-rise” events, a type of flash flooding, in gauged river flow records throughout Great Britain.

We presented our work at the joint FRANC (Forecasting Rainfall exploiting new data Assimilation techniques and Novel observations of Convection) and SINATRA (Susceptibility of catchments to INTense RAinfall and flooding) annual conference held at ECMWF in Reading on 13-14 January 2016.

Sarah Warren’s poster explains how we have analysed historical 15-minute resolution data from 2,578 gauging station records to find exceptional rapid-rise events and assess their probability of occurrence.

Click here to view the poster.

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