Data Uncertainty (EAD5)

Project overview

The Flood Hydrology Roadmap identified that improving our understanding of uncertainty in hydrological analysis is a key issue that needs to be addressed to support advances in flood hydrology.

In flood risk management, hydrological data and analysis typically takes place within a “chain” of models and analytical processes. Hydrology is often the biggest source of uncertainty in flood modelling, as illustrated in some of our case studies in our M6 project, but frequently gets overlooked with more attention paid to other parts of the modelling chain including the hydraulic model.

Understanding the uncertainty in hydrometric data and identifying where in the modelling chain it occurs is extremely important. It has a direct influence upon real world flooding issues ranging from flood defence design and cost benefit analysis to mapping, real time forecasting, flood warning and resilience to climate change. Crucially, uncertainty may make a difference to the decision that is made by a flood management authority.

This project will engage with data users, review best and emerging practice, and highlight knowledge gaps to identify how improvements can be made.

Our project will:

Provide foundation evidence to support change to current practice that will result in a more informed and appropriate use of hydrometric data and lead to better decision-making.
Identify how improvements can be made to our data collection, archiving and data sharing across the EA and wider hydrological community.
Identify the gaps that exist between best practice and current ways of working.
Ultimately, support improvements to scientific methods in hydrology and provide a higher quality data resource, which underpins all our regulatory, statutory and operational duties.

How our project is improving flood hydrology

Being an exemplar of best practice and contributing to our reputation as trusted custodians of national hydrometric data
Improving the foundational data that flood hydrology science is built upon.
Better informing users how data limitations and uncertainties can be better incorporated into decision asking processes.

How our project is contributing to the UK Flood Hydrology Roadmap

The UK Flood Hydrology Roadmap will be realised through 31 actions grouped into 4 thematic work areas of ways of working, data, methods and scientific understanding. Eight actions have been identified to improve methods in UK flood hydrology related to improving flood hydrology methods, models and systems. Six actions have been identified to improve data in U.K. flood hydrology related to improving long term data quality, quantity and accessibility.

This project will contribute to the methods and data strand actions:

M5 - Review the management of uncertainty in flood hydrology - assess how uncertainty is managed in flood hydrology to help answer the following key questions identified in the Roadmap:
- Why is uncertainty management important?
- Who is uncertainty management important for?
- What are the sources of uncertainty in flood hydrology?
- Which types of uncertainty are important?
- What are the greatest sources of uncertainty in modelling for flood risk management?
- What is the relative importance of different assumptions/data sets that contribute to uncertainty?
- How much is the assumption of data stationarity important compared to other assumptions involved in estimating design floods?
D6 - Long term investment in data - ensuring that long-term hydrometric resources are sustainably funded.