Recent events have shown that groundwater flooding is a serious risk to property, infrastructure and social disruption, and is a particular problem for the Chalk of South East England. The nature of this risk is poorly understood, and there is no adequate methodology to assess it.

This proposal integrates state-of-the-art models of the soil, unsaturated zone, groundwater and surface water to provide a new modelling tool for risk assessment, and also investigates the use of simpler models for warning of the potential onset of flooding and regional assessment of risk.

Experimental data from the NERC Lowland Catchment Research Thematic Programme (LOCAR) and historical data from affected areas will be used to test hypotheses and develop and validate the models. The models will be run for future climate states to assess current and future risk using an ensemble of climate models.

Project Duration: April 2007 - April 2010.

This project is funded by NERC - Grant Ref. NE/E002307/1 - through the Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE) NERC directed mode programme.

This project will develop and integrate existing soil, unsaturated zone, groundwater and surface water models, thus producing new tools for flood risk assessment. This project is building on work done for the NERC Lowland Catchment Research Thematic Programme (LOCAR), and will use data from the LOCAR archive which is based at the British Geological Survey (BGS). Any additional data collected will be added to the LOCAR archive as this is not within the remit of this project.

It will also use data collected by BGS and Brighton University but this is by private arrangement and will not be archived as part of this project. The aim of the project is to develop models and modelling tools and as such there are no specific data deliverables. However, output from notable model runs such as runs used in publications or using climate change scenarios will be archived at the NERC Centre of Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).

The data and metadata from this project will be stored at the NERC Centre of Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).

• CEH website - http://www.ceh.ac.uk

• BGS website - http://www.bgs.ac.uk/

• Modelling Groundwater Flooding (Imperial College) - http://www.groundwaterflooding.org.uk/

• The UK Groundwater Forum - http://www.groundwateruk.org/

• Groundwater Modellers'Forum - http://www.groundwateruk.org/html/modelling/

• LOCAR Data Centre website - http://www.nerc-wallingford.ac.uk/locar/main.htm

FREE Programme documentation:

• List of projects funded under the FREE programme.
• FREE Science Plan
• FREE Implementation Plan (January 2008)
• FREE Progress Report (May 2008)
• FREE Progress Report (Oct 2008)
• Data Inputs to FREE projects

This FREE project is headed by Prof Howard Wheater of Imperial College London, with co-investigators at Imperial College London, the NERC British Geological Survey and the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

General queries about these pages should be directed to the BADC support line.