About the project
This project will exploit a novel dataset that captures detailed information on flood signatures and rainfall characteristics, including duration, volume and rate-of-rise, from 1200 catchments, to identify trends in flood signatures, like duration, total volume and rate-of-rise, through non-stationary statistical methods, disentangling the separate effects of climate and land-use change.
Flood risk is becoming an increasing concern as studies suggest that flood frequency and magnitude are changing over time in the UK, with events that would have been rare in the recent past seeming less rare now. While the major UK flood episode in late 2023/early 2024 saw some extreme peak flows, it was remarkable for its repeated nature (with a relentless series of extreme storms), spatial extent, and duration. Other recent episodes have also seen repeated flooding and wide spatial footprints.
Traditional assessments of flood severity and long-term trend are based on peak flow magnitude, but there is a need to better understand other flood signatures like duration, total volume and spatial extent, how they are changing, and why. Capturing the likelihood of simultaneous flooding events is also crucial for resource allocation in emergency response to flooding.
This project will exploit a novel dataset that captures detailed information on flood signatures and rainfall characteristics, including duration, volume and rate-of-rise, from 1200 catchments. Trends in flood signatures will be identified through non-stationary statistical methods such as GAMLSS models, after grouping events into similar families (e.g. intense convective storms in urban catchments).
Co-occurrence of trends will be investigated, applying spatial clustering to identify locations with similar trends. Rainfall, land-use change, and atmospheric circulation indices will be investigated as covariates, disentangling land-use change and regional climatic change impacts, and offering a huge advance on current approaches that largely focus on changes in peak flows only.
Supervisors
As well as Dr Gianni Vesuviano from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH): giaves@ceh.ac.uk (lead supervisor) and Professor Justin Sheffield from the University of Southampton, you will also receive supervision from:
- Dr Gemma Coxon: gemma.coxon@bristol.ac.uk, from the University of Bristol.
- Dr Adam Griffin: adagri@ceh.ac.uk, from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH).
- Dr Sean Longfield: sean.longfield@environment-agency.gov.uk, from the Environment Agency.
Please contact the lead supervisor if you require further information about the project.
References
Griffin, A., Vesuviano, G., Wilson, D., Sefton, C., Turner, S., Armitage, R. and Suman, G. (2025), Putting the English Flooding of 2019–2021 in the Context of Antecedent Conditions. Journal of Flood Risk Management, 18: e70016.
Zheng, Y., Coxon, G., Woods, R., Li, J. and Feng, P. (2023). Controls on the spatial and temporal patterns of rainfall-runoff event characteristics‐a large sample of catchments across Great Britain. Water Resources Research, e2022WR033226.
Griffin, A., Vesuviano, G. and Stewart, E. (2019). Have trends changed over time? A study of UK peak flow data and sensitivity to observation period. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 19, 2157-2167.
