THE HISTORICAL FLOODS
Learnings towards
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ABOUT THE PROJECT |
Mobilising Britain’s historical flood information in support of contemporary flood risk assessments
This project aims to investigate and assess the utility of documentary evidence of past flood events with contemporary flood risk assessments in Bath.
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The project (funded by The Leverhulme Trust) aims to investigate and assess the utility of documentary evidence (e.g. newspaper articles, policy briefings, photographs, schematics) of past flood events within contemporary flood risk assessments. A thorough archive search has resulted in the recollection of data on the spatial distribution of past flood events and in the reconstruction of the flood policy history of the City of Bath. The findings feed into the development of hydraulic models representing historical changes in the channels and hydraulic structures of the River Avon. The hydraulic models translate flow into water levels, making use of the documentary evidence and historical data collected through the archive search. The propagation of errors occurring during this modelling process is captured in a series of novel, advanced statistical models.
The focus of the ongoing research is to prove whether it is worth the additional effort required to translate the documentary evidence of past flood events into a useful format for modern assessments. The augmented data series created from these efforts would allow an assessment of long-terms trends or shifts in flood risk. |
The research is organised into three sequential work packages (WP1, WP2 and WP3)
WP1Historical changes in river hydraulics and management
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WP2Re-constructing historical events using hydraulic modelling
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WP3Flood frequency analysis using combined dataset
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