FUTURE-DRAINAGE (Webinar)

UK Climate Resilience Programme Webinar Series 2021

Date: 24 November, 1-3pm (GMT)

Speakers: Professor Hayley Fowler (University of Newcastle), Lizzie Kendon (UK Met Office), Murray Dale (JBA) and Xiaodong Ming (Loughborough University)

Chair: Professor Suraje Dessai

See links to a video of the webinar and presentation slides below

Abstract

This event will present the new climate uplifts and guidance for their use developed by FUTURE-DRAINAGE.

The uplifts are designed for organisations who need to allow for an increase to design storm rainfall in sub-daily to daily durations, to account for the impact of climate change projections in the UK, based on the new UK Climate Projections (UKCP) high resolution 2.2km data (UKCP Local). The uplifts and their output format have been developed in close consultation with a project stakeholder group comprising representatives of many UK water and sewerage companies and UK regulators. This information represents a world first: countrywide climate change allowances for high-intensity rainfall derived from a convection-permitting climate model with quantified uncertainty and are likely to be used to update current guidance for urban drainage design and surface water flooding.

The webinar will cover the approach to develop the rainfall uplifts, how the uplifts have been organised, as detailed in the guidance. Within FUTURE-DRAINAGE we also performed a pilot study for 6 UK cities to explore the potential impacts of the new uplifts on surface water flooding. This will also be presented, together with time for discussion and questions.

Programme

13:00 UK Climate Resilience Programme news – Professor Suraje Dessai, UK Climate Resilience Champion

13.05 Introduction to the FUTURE-DRAINAGE project – Professor Hayley Fowler, Newcastle University

13.10 Climate projections through to climate uplifts – Prof Elizabeth Kendon, Met Office and Bristol University

13.20 Using the Guidance – Murray Dale, JBA

13.30 Questions and Discussion – Panel chaired by Suraje Dessai

13.55 Break

14.00 Intro to work on surface water flooding within FUTURE-DRAINAGE – Prof Hayley Fowler, Newcastle University

14.05 Implications of new climate uplifts in fully-hydrodynamic urban flood models for 6 UK cities – Dr Xiaodong Ming, Loughborough University

14.15 Comparison to national RoFSW methodology- Murray Dale, JBA

14.25 Questions and discussion- Panel chaired by Hayley Fowler

15.00 End

Speaker biographies

Prof Hayley Fowler is Professor of Climate Change Impacts in the School of Engineering at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on improved physical understanding of changing precipitation extremes and providing better projections for climate adaptation. She has pioneered new downscaling techniques to bridge the gap between climate modellers and users of climate scenarios (e.g. UKCP09 Weather Generator). She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2018) and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow (2014-19) for her work on understanding climate change impacts on hydrological systems, extreme rainfall and flooding, following a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2011) and NERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006-10). She led the GEWEX Hydroclimatology Panel sub-daily precipitation cross-cut and is Chief Editor of Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Climate Studies. She was a Contributing Author to Chapter 8: Water Cycle and Chapter 11: Extremes for the IPCC 6^th Assessment Report WGI and Chapter 1 for the UK 3^rd Climate Change Risk Assessment. She is British Hydrological Society President Elect. She is on the Environment Agency Expert panel for Boosting Action in Surface Water: Plausible Extremes and a member of the Governance board for the Flood Hydrology Roadmap. She advises government through her roles on the Strategic Advisory Board for RESAS Science and on the BEIS Science Expert Group. She is also a member of the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme Science Review Group. Locally, she co-chairs the Newcastle Net Zero Task Force.

Professor Lizzie Kendon leads a team of scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre (based at Bristol University) using very high-resolution (kilometre-scale) models to study climate change, with a focus on gaining a better understanding of extremes and their future change. Her work has been pioneering in the field of convection-permitting climate modelling, with high-profile papers in Nature Climate Change and Nature Comms. She recently led work delivering the first national climate scenarios at convection-permitting scale, under the UKCP project. Lizzie also has a joint position as Professor in the Faculty of Science at Bristol University, exploiting new high-resolution climate projections for impacts modelling and user applications.

Murray Dale is a Technical Director at JBA Consulting. He has worked in water and hydrometeorology for nearly 30 years and has been involved in climate change impacts on rainfall since 1999. A Chartered Meteorologist, he is keen to help the water industry and flood risk community understand the impacts of changing rainfall in the future. Murray led JBA’s involvement in Future Drainage and was responsible for the development of the user guidance.

Dr Xiaodong Ming is a postdoctoral research associate in flood risk assessment at the School of Architecture, Building, and Civil Engineering, based at Loughborough University. He graduated from Newcastle University with a PhD degree in 2019. His research focuses on hydrodynamic modelling, flood forecasting, and flood risk assessment. He has been working on the development of a high-performance hydrodynamic model system. He recently developed a multi-hazard risk assessment framework for compound flooding and a real-time flood forecasting system based on the hydrodynamic model.