The aim of this project is to examine records of past moderate and extreme flood events, and of associated environmental variables related to the causes of flooding, and to undertake an exploratory data analysis of these. This would avoid relying immediately on the assumptions built into existing methodology and provide an independent check on these. It would also allow the construction of a statistical methodology tailored both to the observed properties of the datasets and to the estimation of the relevant properties of extreme events that need to be extracted from the data. Joint probability analysis would be one of the main statistical approaches being used. As well as providing useful insight into the occurrence of flooding, this has the potential to lead to more statistically efficient estimation of floods. Further insights into flooding problems will be sought by directly considering the seasonality of flood events in all the analyses. The datasets available can realistically be expected to provide good estimates of floods with return periods of 10-20 years, but the statistical models used can be employed to extrapolate to return periods of 50, 100 or even 1000 years. For such extrapolation the uncertainties inherent in this estimation are likely to be large and an important aim of the project will be to provide a useful assessment of this uncertainty. Hourly datasets already held at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) will be used for the project.

Project Duration: October 2007 - October 2010.

This project is funded by NERC - Grant Ref. NE/F001037/1 - through the Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE) NERC directed mode programme.

This project will analyse a variety of existing data sources and develop a statistical study of past flood events. The project has been designed around:

- Hourly river flow data for 40 stations in Great Britain already held at CEH, plus a further 5 stations from the Environment Agency.
- Hourly average rainfalls for the above catchments, also already held at CEH.
- Soil moisture deficits at a monthly resolution, also already held at CEH.
- Hourly sea surge and total sea level data for the A-gauge tide network around Great Britain. These data are already archived at the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) and available via the web.

No further data will be collected as the deliverables from the project will be in the form of a message.

• CEH website - http://www.ceh.ac.uk

• BODC website - http://www.bodc.ac.uk/

• 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 Dr Cecilia Svensson of the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), with co-investigators at CEH and Lancaster University.

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