Improving operational flood hydrology in England – progress and challenges

In England, the practice of flood hydrology underpins both flood forecasting and £6bn of flood management investment by the UK Government. However, operational flood hydrology has failed to innovate and adapt to the changing demands of the 21^st century. There is an over reliance of methods that assume stationarity in climate and land use. Uncertainty in hydrology is poorly characterised and communicated to decision-makers. The Environment Agency’s Flood Hydrology Improvements Programme (FHIP) is seeking to make a step-change in flood hydrology in England.

The Environment Agency is the environmental regulator and is also responsible for managing the risk of flooding from main rivers, reservoirs, estuaries and the sea. It has made a commitment to improving flood hydrology by funding the FHIP between 2021-2027. It will design a new benchmarking process to help method developers evaluate their methods for suitability in an operational context, helping to increase the ease and pace of innovation. It will further explore the journey of embedding a new method and uncertainty estimation for operational use to better understand the barriers and to show the lessons learned with those developing alternatives.

This PICO presentation will allow you to explore the full breadth of the FHIP, including its roots in the UK 25-year Flood Hydrology Roadmap, a community codeveloped plan to improve flood hydrology. It will showcase the successes of completed projects - including the review of open methods, the data rescue of paper hydrometric charts, and the development of new data dashboards – and will share the recommendations relevant to all hydrologists that emerged from that work.

Finally, it will look to the future and the plans to the end of the programme in 2027, what comes next, and the challenges that remain.