Projects Profile
Project Title
Novel Early flood Warning and Risk Assessment System (NEWS) – a new generation software expert system for flood warning and risk analysis
Partnership
Dr. Hannah Cloke, King’s College London
Prof. Zhijia Li, Hohai University
Project Aim
This project brings together the research expertise from the environment monitoring and modeling group at King’s and the hydrology group at Hohai University to develop the first commercial viable dynamic multipurpose early flood warning software expert system which will be able to perform entire spectrum of flood risk analysis and event prediction from short-term (a few hours), medium-term (a few days) to long-term (a number of years) reliably and accurately which is largely non-achievable using conventional models and software.
Inspiration for the projects
Flooding is a widespread and devastating natural disaster across the globe. It is the worst kind of natural disaster in the UK. Annual flood damage in the UK is about £1.5 billion and expected to increase to £3.5 billion over the next few years (Association of British Insurers). Floods took place in China in the last decade is ranked the worst among recorded floods worldwide in terms of the number of human fatalities and economic losses (Munich Re-Insurance). Its damage is amount for about 1% of China’s GDP annually.
To minimize flooding damages, effective flood event forecasting and risk analysis systems have become a priority, especially in many flood prone countries including China and the UK. Several software expert systems capable of performing flood analysis have been commercialized, e.g. Halcrow’s ISIS and Delft Hydraulics’ FEWS. They have achieved significant market success. These systems, however, are all based on hydrology modeling methodology which suffers from precision and reliability problems, due to the lack of the capability to consider the climate variation influence to the events.
At King’s College London, a novel hydro-climatic flood risk analysis and prediction framework has been successfully demonstrated in the Upper Severn Catchment recently under the UK NERC support and subsequently in the Upper Huai Catchment with the ICUK partnership grant (PG) support. The latter was jointly developed with Hohai University, a world leading hydrology research institute in China. The new technology integrates a multiple numerical weather/climate prediction system with hydrological and hydraulic models to offer an effective, state-of-the-art early forecasting system for flood event prediction and risk analysis.
In this project King’s and Hohai universities are working together to take the development work to the next stage and to develop a novel software expert system - Novel Early Flood Warning System (NEWS) to address the ever increasing needs for accurate and reliable flood risk analysis, prediction, and forecasting software tools from governmental agencies and industry alike.
Commercial Potential and Further Development
The project will produce commercial prototype of a software expert system for flood risk analysis, assessment, prediction and management which will for first time incorporate climate influence with hydrology effects to achieve true multipurpose dynamic early flood risk analysis and event forecasting with accuracy and reliability.
The project has significant socio-economic benefit and commercial values. It could provide a valuable tool to research institutions, governmental agencies, and industry alike. The software tool could allow governmental agencies or meteorology offices to carry out accurate flooding risks to be assessed accurately and in advance and allow better management of the flooding events. Various relevant industry companies will also be able to carry out better and more realistic flood events risk assessment to allow their business operation to be based on solid sciences, e.g. for insurance companies to produce realistic premium, or carry out flooding damage litigations, etc., for hydraulic infrastructure operators, consultancy and engineering companies to carry out proper flooding risk and impact assessments in order for the infrastructures to be designed, constructed, and operated safely.
The project team has already received numerous enquiries and support from various institutions including companies. Some strong interests wishing to cooperate in future with the team in commercial exploration of this technology have also been expressed by some industry company.
