LISFLOOD-FP is a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model specifically designed to simulate floodplain inundation in a computationally efficient manner over complex topography. It is capable of simulating grids up to 106 cells for dynamic flood events and can take advantage of new sources of terrain information from remote sensing techniques such as airborne laser altimetry and satellite interferometric radar.

The model predicts water depths in each grid cell at each time step, and hence can simulate the dynamic propagation of flood waves over fluvial, coastal and estuarine floodplains. It is a non-commercial, research code developed as part of an effort to improve our fundamental understanding of flood hydraulics, flood inundation prediction and flood risk assessment.

In this project the COSMO-Skymed Synthetic Aperture Radar (CSK-SAR) were acquired processed and transformed into Water Level Observations (WLOs) by crossing with LiDAR Digital Terrain Model. Environment Agency (EA) rain gauges were used to estimate precipitation and MORECS as potential evapotranspiration to generate the forcings into a catchment-scale rainfall-runoff hydrologic model (topHSPF) to generate simulated runoff forecast, to be used as forcing for the coupled Lisflood-FP v5.9 inundation model. EA water level gauges were used for validation. CSK-SAR based WLO were assimilated into ensemble simulations with Lisflood-FP v5.9 generated with perturbed physics (friction parameters, bathymetric errors) and runoff inputs from the above mentioned hydrologic model.