Research project

IMPETUS - improving predictions of drought for user decision making

Research groups:

Energy and Climate Change Group
Lead researcher:

Dr Ben Anderson
Status:

Not active

Project overview

The Improving Predictions of Drought for User Decision-Making (IMPETUS) project aimed to develop an ambitious integrated water demand model as part of the UK droughts research programme. The model comprised:

- meteorological models – led by the University of Reading
- hydrological drought models – led by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
- domestic demand models predicated on drought conditions – led by the University of Southampton

As part of this work, we developed two domestic water demand microsimulation models. The first used a synthetic sample of 1800 households with constructed water usage habits while the second used the Lancaster SPRG/ARCC water survey. The latter was the first domestic water demand microsimulation to be based on reported water-using practices rather than water appliance-based assumptions.

Staff

Lead researcher

Dr Ben Anderson

Principal Research Fellow

Research interests

‘big’ data-driven analysis of habitual energy and water consumption
the impacts of interventions or natural socio-technical change on patterns of demand
the linkage of 'appliance' monitoring with traditional forms of social science data in support of socio-technical innovation