Hannah Cloke is Professor of Hydrology and Director of Hydrology Research at the University of Reading, specialising in land surface modelling, flood forecasting and catchment hydrology. Her activities include leading a large research team in project SINATRA, which is part of NERC’s 5 year ‘Flooding From Intense Rainfall’ programme, and helping to develop the European Flood Awareness System. Hannah is an active member of HEPEX and is coordinator for the ‘Techniques for Extreme Rainfall and Flood Runoff Estimation’ theme for the International Hydrological Programme (IHP): FRIEND-Water network.
What research will you be presenting at the workshop?
I will introduce some of the ways in which we can improve our understanding and prediction of floods using hydrological ensembles and also use of satellite data. For example, recent flood events in the south of the UK and in the Balkans have shown the great promise of using operational hydrological ensemble forecasting for early flood warning. But it is clear there are many technical and communication challenges that remain for probabilistic flood forecasts to achieve their full potential. Also, at the climate scale, using ensembles of flood projections is not straightforward. One of the best ways to help constrain the uncertainties in flood prediction is to gather more data!
Why have HEPEX co-organised this workshop?
HEPEX seeks to advance the science and practice of hydrologic ensemble prediction (HEPS) and its use for risk-based decision making. It is a community initiative dealing with specific topics including:
- What adaptations are required for meteorological ensemble systems to be coupled with hydrological ensemble systems?
- How should the existing hydrological ensemble prediction systems be modified to account for all sources of uncertainty?
- What is the best way for the user community to take advantage of ensemble forecasts?
The coming together of H-SAF and HEPEX in this workshop is a really timely opportunity for collaboration between these two communities, and it is great to see ECMWF fostering these opportunities to advance our hydrological science.
Didn’t HEPEX just have an important birthday?
Yes, in June of this year more than 70 scientists came together for the HEPEX 10th Anniversary workshop in the new NCEP Center in Maryland to discuss the techniques and uses of ensemble predictions for flood forecasting, droughts and water resource management. HEPEX has come a long way in 10 years – back in 2003 there were no operational daily hydrological ensemble prediction. Now several operational centres produce daily hydrological ensemble predictions and HEPEX has over 300 members who contribute to a lively blog discussion about many aspects of hydrological forecasting and predictions.
FRIEND-Water also co-sponsored this workshop. Can you tell us more?
FRIEND-Water is an international collaborative network of experts that aims to generate new understanding about regional hydrology and multi-scale water cycle processes. As a cross-cutting theme of UNESCO’s International Hydrology Program (IHP), FRIEND-Water contributes to research on: regional water resources, droughts, global change and the water cycle, and water education and capacity building. The H-SAF HEPEX workshop is of particular interest to the FRIEND-Water network because we are researching hydrological applications of satellite data and representing uncertainty in flood prediction with hydrological ensembles.
For more information:
- HEPEX: www.hepex.org. Twitter @hepexorg
- FRIEND-Water floods theme: contact Hannah on h.l.cloke@reading.ac.uk