Webinar: FUTURE-DRAINAGE: Ensemble climate change rainfall estimates for sustainable drainage

UK Climate Resilience Programme webinar series

Wednesday 24 June  12.00-13.00

Speakers: Professor Hayley Fowler, Professor of Climate Change Impacts, Newcastle University (Project PI) and Murray Dale, Technical Director and Chartered Meteorologist, JBA

Abstract: FUTURE-DRAINAGE will use outputs from the new UKCP18 perturbed physics convection-permitting model (CPM) ensemble (at 2.2km resolution across the UK) to produce revised rainfall ‘uplifts’, the first assessment of uncertainty in rainfall ‘uplifts’ and new guidance for UK urban drainage design and urban flood risk assessment for use in climate adaptation. This will include the development of a new regional pooling approach for spatially-correlated CPM outputs, and modelling to compare the national RoFSW methodology to outputs from fully-hydrodynamic urban flood models, for the same cities and uplifts, to quantify the uncertainty in and determine the level of detail in modelling needed for future urban flood predictions. 

Consultation with water and sewerage companies (WaSCs), the Environment Agency (EA) and Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is embedded within the FUTURE-DRAINAGE project. Eight WaSCs, the EA and SEPA were represented at a stakeholder workshop in September 2019 and the drainage community briefed further by a presentation by Murray Dale at the CIWEM Urban Drainage Group Annual Conference in November 2019. Aspects of the research concerning return periods of the results, regionalisation of the uplifts, uplift confidence and how to use the uncertainty estimates in practical ways in sewerage planning are being considered through the project with stakeholder input. 

This presentation will explain the aims and objectives of the project and show some of the results so far on the new statistical method developed to produce return period estimates from CPM outputs across the UK, and some preliminary assessment of the uplifts.