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HR Wallingford

58 Projects, page 1 of 12
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: NE/E002382/1
    Funder Contribution: 183,942 GBP

    This proposed research will develop the new methodology required to make a step-change in our ability to quantify fluvial flood risk at large scales, incorporating climate change. This will combine existing and emerging technologies, to provide national and regional estimates of flood risk based on gridded models for improved assessment of flood risk to recurrence intervals in excess of 50 years. Linking gridded rainfall, runoff, flood defence performance and flood inundation models will significantly improve our ability to assess flood risk from extreme events and explore the potential impacts of climate change, including new scenarios, as they become available from UKCIPnext. This will include a spatially and temporally consistent gridded rainfall model operating over large spatial domains, a high resolution gridded runoff and flow routing model capable of modelling at the national scale and a continuous system analysis of flood inundation, taking account of defence performance. As each of these models will be run continuously in time, a continuous, linked flood risk analysis system will be developed for the first time. Each model will also be able to use derived future changes in climate to produce predictions of future in flood risk. Moreover there will be an assessment of the model and data uncertainties, as well as estimates of uncertainty due to climate change. These uncertainty assessments will include the propagation of uncertainty through the linked modelling system. The research will utilise many existing sources of data and build upon some established models and techniques, such as the Neyman-Scott Rectangular Pulses (NSRP) stochastic rainfall at the University of Newcastle, the CEH Grid-to-Grid (G2G) model, the RASP system models, and the use ensemble scenario sets to represent uncertainty. At the regional or large basin-scale analyses will include a grid-based (5km) rainfall model linked to a (1km) gridded runoff and routing model and associated knowledge of defence systems and new routines developed to translate rainfall to river levels. Such a modelling system is ultimately applicable at a national scale and this will be demonstrated for river flows. The precipitation for this demonstration will be sourced from observed rainfall datasets, or modelled time series, such as those available from RCMs driven with re-analysis data. The impact of future changes in rainfall, runoff and river levels on flood risk will be assessed within an enhanced version of the HR Wallingford RASP HLMplus model. Scenarios of climate change will be derived from a range of both global (GCMs) and regional climate models (RCMs). There will also be an analysis of the application of multi-ensemble climate scenarios and the generation of probabilistic scenarios of change in future flood risk.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/G060509/1
    Funder Contribution: 110,405 GBP

    Much current discussion about transport and climate change focuses on the impact of transport on climate change. Indeed, many mitigation measures are focussed upon the transport change, and many mitigation measures are focussed upon the transport sector. However, FUTURENET recognizes that climate change also has an impact on transport. This impact has two dimensions: an engineering dimension derived from the interaction between climate design, weather events and the physical network, and a socio-economic dimension derived from the interaction between weather and climate and the patterns of transport demand. FUTURENET integrates both in assessing the future resilience of the UK transport system. This interdisciplinary approach will assist stakeholders in adapting the transport network and increasing resilience of critical transport infrastructure. Specifically FUTURENET seeks to develop a number of scenarios for how the transport system in the UK might look in 2050, and will investigate the resilience of each of these scenarios to the effects of climate change. The investigation will be carried out through the five work packagesa) WP1- The development of possible UK transport scenarios for 2050, through detailed literature surveys and the results of a number of expert workshops.b) WP2 - Identification of route corridor for study and development of an inventory of infrastructure that covers the complete range of infrastructure for the chosen route.c) WP3 - Models of the failure modes of transport systems, which will identify existing models and thresholds for the effects of climate on transport systems, and will develop new models where there are gaps in knowledge.d) WP4- Model development and application, which will develop an overarching model framework that will combine the models identified in WP3 with climate change scenarios and the transport scenarios outlined in WP1, to enable the resilience of different types of transport network to be evaluated.e) WP5 - Generic Tools and Dissemination, through which the results of the project will be made available in an accessible form to a wide variety of stakeholders, and the model of WP4 made available for application to other route corridors.FUTURENET brings together a wide variety of academic expertise spanning the engineering, environmental and social sciences, together with a diverse group of stakeholders in the transport industry. It has the potential both to develop a deeper understanding of the underlying science on the effects of climate change on transport systems and to provide information and useful tools on how such systems can be made more resilient.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/X02802X/1
    Funder Contribution: 265,251 GBP

    Coastal and estuarine areas are under constant erosion/sedimentation pressure. The sustainable development of these areas depends on our understanding of and ability to predict the effect of complex sediment transport and morphodynamic processes and the development of effective applied engineering solutions. Coastal protection is an important issue in the implementation of successful Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) plans. The objective of the intrersectoral Network SEDIMARE is the interdisciplinary training and award of a PhD degree to Researchers in coastal processes and engineering, aiming towards a sustainable coastal use and protection. The Network comprises 6 universities, 4 private sector beneficiaries (1 Applied Research Institute, 1 corporation, and 2 SMEs), and 1 industrial associated partner. The Network will provide a training-through-research program to 10 Researchers, which comprises comprehensive academic training including web-based teaching, inter-institutional co-supervision, intersectoral secondments, summer/winter schools, workshops, complementary activities, dissemination, and outreach activities. The research plan is organized into 3 Work Packages (WP): (1) Sediment Transport Processes, (2) Coupling of Flow, Sediment Transport, and Morphodynamics, and (3) Sustainable Coastal Engineering Solutions. Each WP includes several projects, whose implementation is based on the strong interaction between all beneficiaries. The topics include: complex sediment transport processes involving sandmud mixtures, mixed-size sands, and granular-fluid mixtures; coupling between hydrodynamics (waves, storm surges, and tides), sediment transport, and morphological changes; and engineering solutions to issues/problems related to erosion/sedimentation with emphasis on sustainability and resilience. The research methods include effective process-based engineering modeling, advanced numerical simulations, and innovative experiments.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: NE/N015568/1
    Funder Contribution: 120,437 GBP

    The BLUE-coast consortium addresses NERC highlight topic B, Coastal morphology: coastal sediment budgets and their role in coastal recovery. This project will adopt a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, combining the expertise of biologists, coastal engineers, geologists, geomorphologists and oceanographers with complementary experimental (field and laboratory) and numerical skills, to understand what processes control the coastal system dynamics and answer the relevant scientific questions. BLUE-coast will explicitly address uncertainties in the prediction of medium-term (years) and long-term (decadal and longer) regional sediment budgets and better understand morphological change and how the coast recovers after sequences of events, such as storms by: (i) improving representation of both transportable and source material within the coastal zone within models; (ii) establishing how transportable material is mediated by the ecological system using exemplar habitats representative of the UK coastal zone; (iii) assessing sensitivities of this mixed-sediment physical and biological system to possible changes in external forcing, including the combined impact of multiple variables and sequences of events, with the goal of understanding the internal dynamics of the system (e.g. nonlinearities, critical thresholds, tipping points, precursors and antecedent conditions) in parallel with assessments of behavioural uncertainties, and (iv) reduce uncertainties in medium to long -term prediction of regional sediment budgets and morphological change. Project Overview: the scope of the Highlight Topic sets a requirement for quantitative knowledge on both physical and biological dynamic coastal processes in order to improve hydrodynamic model predictions of regional sediment budgets and morphological change. To deliver an integrated, holistic and cost effective response, our main activities will combine (i) a detailed study of representative shelf sea landscapes that spans the full variety of organism-sediment conditions typically observed in temperate coasts, with (ii) in situ validation studies of key processes, and (iii) manipulative laboratory and field experiments aimed at unambiguously identifying causal relationships and establishing generality, and (iv) integration of new understanding of controls and effects on coastal morphodynamics at regional scales and under environmental forcing. By undertaking a substantial element of in situ observation and process studies, we will directly quantify the effect of antecedent conditions on coastal erosion and recovery, the effect of biota on mediating sediment fluxes and pathways and the effect of event sequencing on coastal erosion and recovery, across a range of geographically significant sediment habitats. These data will act as calibration and validation datasets for existing and innovative numerical models that will be able to simulate the coastal morphological consequences of key biological and physical drivers, alone and in combination. We will gain mechanistic understanding and achieve generality by performing carefully controlled experiments, generating different flow regimes using flumes, tracking changes during natural events using state-of-the-art field measurement technology and, in the laboratory, using intact sediments and sediment communities exposed to anticipated future conditions (warming, ocean acidification, nutrient loading). As it is not feasible to quantify all the relevant morphodynamic processes at high spatial resolution across the entire UK coast, our approach is to address the principal objectives through 4 interdisciplinary workpackages that follow a logical progression of scientific themes.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: NE/J00541X/1
    Funder Contribution: 371,788 GBP

    Prediction of changing coastal morphology over timescales of decades raises scientific challenges to which there are not yet widely applicable solutions. Yet improved predictions are essential in order to quantify the risk of coastal erosion, which is significant in its own right and also one of the main mediators of coastal flood risk. Whilst 'bottom-up' process-based models provide valuable evidence about hydrodynamic, sediment transport and morphodynamic processes in the short term, their predictive accuracy over scales of decades is for the time being fundamentally limited. Meanwhile, behavioural systems models, that focus on the main processes and feedback mechanisms that regulate coastal form have been shown to have predictive capability at the mesoscale (10-100 years and 10-100 km). However, their application has been limited to a rather narrow sub-set of coastal forms. The iCoast project is based upon a hierarchical systems concept which combines (i) the beneficial features of process-based models, (ii) a new generation of coastal behavioural systems models, and (iii) an extended approach to coastal systems mapping, which can be used to systematise and formalise different sources of knowledge about coastal behaviour. All the software developed within iCoast will be open source and OpenMI compliant. The research is focussed upon four deliverables that have been identified as major challenges in the NERC Natural Hazards Theme: Deliverable 1 will be an overall systems framework. The successful approach to coastal systems mapping developed by French et al. will be extended and applied to all of the England and Wales, making use of a new systems mapping tool. These new coastal systems maps can both supersede the coastal cells and sub-cells currently used in shoreline management planning and provide an evidence-based framework for more quantitative modelling. Therein, hydrodynamic and sediment transport coastal area models will be implemented at a broad spatial scale in order to provide evidence of wave and tidal forcings and sediment pathways. The systems framework will be implemented in open source software tools and coupled with methods for uncertainty analysis. Deliverable 2 will provide a new generation of behavioural geomorphic modules, which can be linked to enable simulation of coupled coastal-estuary-offshore landform behaviour at a meso-scale. Existing reduced complexity behavioural modules, several of which are held in-house within the iCoast consortium (SCAPE, ASMITA, various versions of 1-line beach models) will be reviewed and development and incremental improvement opportunities will be identified. They will be researched intensively by a team with unique experience of this type of model development. The scope of data-based modules that can exploit the growing datasets from coastal observatories will also be extended. The models will be integrated within a systems framework in order to study emergent properties and explore key sensitivities. Deliverable 3 will entail application and validation of two distinct coastal regions: the Suffolk Coast (Sub-Cell 3c) and Liverpool Bay (Sub-Cells 11a/11b), exploring the sensitivities of these coastal regions to changes in sediment supply resulting from sea-level rise, climate change and coastal management scenarios. This will yield the results needed for high impact publication and the demonstrations that are essential to build confidence in new approaches being transferred into practice. Deliverable 4 will facilitate knowledge transfer of the new methods through a range of dissemination mechanisms, including tutorials, manuals and knowledge transfer workshops. Our open source modelling strategy will initiate a community modelling approach in the coastal research community, at the same time as maximising access by practitioners to the knowledge generated at a time when requirements for coastal adaptation urgently require new predictive capability.

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