The Flood Forecasting Centre (FFC) is a joint venture between the Environment Agency and the Met Office to provide improved flood risk guidance for England and Wales. The FFC is based in the Operations Centre at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter and is jointly staffed from both organisations.
In the UK, meteorological and hydrological warnings are issued by different bodies. The Met Office operates the National Severe Weather Warning Service for the whole of the United Kingdom. Water and flood management responsibilities (including flood warning) are now devolved to each of the four home nations. This largely reflects the nature of UK catchments being typically small, compared to the weather systems that are the source of flooding, and a traditional reliance on live hydrometric measurements for public flood warnings rather than on flood forecasts provided by numerical weather prediction.
In England and Wales, the creation of the Environment Agency (initially covering both home nations until 2014) coincided with a switch from a period noted for droughts to national flood events. The major national floods of Easter 1998 led to significant post event reviews identifying areas of improvement in terms of flood forecasting, monitoring and warnings Easter 1998 floods and Bye report. The Environment Agency's response included establishing a National Flood Warning Centre which operated between 1999 and 2003. This focussed on raising public awareness and improving flood forecasting and warning.
The Autumn 2000 Floods soon followed and post event reviews again identified deficiencies in flood forecasting and warning, notably in a reluctance to use the latest computer models to help understand and communicate flood risk data/file/292917/geho0301bmxo-e-e.pdf Autumn 2000 Review
Critically, both major reviews identified weaknesses in the flow of information between the Met Office and Environment Agency leading to this action in the Autumn 2000 Review: "The Agency and the Met Office will undertake a joint review of weather forecasting performance relative to flood forecasting need". In response a joint EA/Met Office technical workshop was held in May 2001 where the suggestion of a joint centre between the two organisations was first proposed by flood forecasting and warning practitioners at a working level. This ambition for closer working was underpinned by continual improvements in weather and flood forecasting. Numerical weather prediction had developed to a scale where rainfall forecasts were more reliably targeting catchments as global model scales reduced from 60 km grids in 1998, to 40 km in 2005 and 25 km in 2010. [1] Flood Forecasting systems had also developed to be able to receive rainfall forecasts and drive real time hydrological forecasts for thousands of sites.
Following severe flooding across the UK in 2007 a further review was commissioned by the government to see what lessons could be learned. Chaired by Sir Michael Pitt the review produced a number of recommendations which were published in June 2008, among them was the recommendation that "The Environment Agency and the Met Office should work together, through a joint centre, to improve their technical capability to forecast, model and warn against all sources of flooding".
With these technical developments and political support, the parties commenced work on establishing the joint centre in 2008.
The FFC was officially opened on 21 April 2009 in London by Environment Minister Hilary Benn. [2] Its role is to provide better advice to governments, local authorities, emergency responders and the general public via its parent organisations. It faced its first major test in November 2009 when severe flooding affected Northern England, in particular Cumbria and the town of Cockermouth. The Pitt Review progress report highlighted the accuracy of the advice issued ahead of this event. [3] In April 2011 the FFC moved from central London to a permanent base within the Operations Centre at the Met Office HQ in Exeter. [3] It currently provides a range of operational Hydrometeorology services across England and Wales.
The FFC provides a range of services to a number of customer groups:
As well as delivering operational services the centre runs a continual improvement programme to review and improve its performance following flood events. Published papers, including contributions from FFC staff, describing some of this work are listed below.
The Meteorological Office, abbreviated as the Met Office, is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and is led by CEO Penelope Endersby, who took on the role as Chief Executive in December 2018 and is the first woman to do so. The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change.
The Environment Agency (EA) is a non-departmental public body, established in 1996 and sponsored by the United Kingdom government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with responsibilities relating to the protection and enhancement of the environment in England.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency is Scotland's environmental regulator and national flood forecasting, flood warning and strategic flood risk management authority. Its main role is to protect and improve Scotland's environment. SEPA does this by helping business and industry to understand their environmental responsibilities, enabling customers to comply with legislation and good practice and to realise the economic benefits of good environmental practice. One of the ways SEPA does this is through the NetRegs environmental guidance service. It protects communities by regulating activities that can cause harmful pollution and by monitoring the quality of Scotland's air, land and water. The regulations it implements also cover the storage, transport and disposal of radioactive materials.
The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) is a centre for excellence in environmental science across water, land and air. The organisation has a long history of investigating, monitoring and modelling environmental change. It operates from four sites in the UK and one in Ghana. Research topics include: air pollution, biodiversity, chemical risks in the environment, extreme weather events, droughts, floods, greenhouse gas emissions, soil health, sustainable agriculture, sustainable ecosystems, water quality, and water resources management.
Hydrometeorology is a branch of meteorology and hydrology that studies the transfer of water and energy between the land surface and the lower atmosphere for academic research, commercial gain or operational forecasting purposes.
The European Flood Awareness System is a European Commission initiative to increase preparedness for riverine floods across Europe.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) (Urdu: محکمہ موسمیات پاکستان, also known as Pakistan Met Office), is an autonomous and independent institution tasked with providing weather forecasts and public warnings concerning weather for protection, safety and general information.
A flood warning is closely linked to the task of flood forecasting. The distinction between the two is that the outcome of flood forecasting is a set of forecast time-profiles of channel flows or river levels at various locations, while "flood warning" is the task of making use of these forecasts to make decisions about whether warnings of floods should be issued to the general public or whether previous warnings should be rescinded or retracted.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to hydrology:
Hurricane Bawbag, also known as Cyclone Friedhelm was an intense extratropical cyclone which brought hurricane-force winds to Scotland at the beginning of December 2011. The storm also brought prolonged gales and rough seas to the rest of the British Isles, as well as parts of Scandinavia. On 8 December, winds reached up to 165 mph (266 km/h) at elevated areas, with sustained wind speeds of up to 80 mph (130 km/h) reported across populous areas. The winds uprooted trees and resulted in the closure of many roads, bridges, schools and businesses. Overall, the storm was the worst to affect Scotland in 10 years, though a stronger storm occurred less than a month afterwards, on 3 January 2012. Although the follow-up storm was more intense, the winter of 2011–12 is usually remembered for Bawbag among Scots.
The 2012 Great Britain and Ireland floods were a series of weather events that affected parts of Great Britain and Ireland periodically during the course of 2012 and on through the winter into 2013. The beginning of 2012 saw much of the United Kingdom experiencing droughts and a heat wave in March. A series of low pressure systems steered by the jet stream brought the wettest April in 100 years, and flooding across Britain and Ireland. Continuing through May and leading to the wettest beginning to June in 150 years, with flooding and extreme events occurring periodically throughout Britain and parts of Atlantic Europe.
The flash flood guidance system (FFGS) was designed and developed by the Hydrologic Research Center, a non-profit public-benefit corporation located in San Diego, CA, US, for use by meteorological and hydrologic forecasters throughout the world. The primary purpose of the FFGS is to provide operational forecasters and disaster management agencies with real-time information pertaining to the threat of small-scale flash flooding throughout a specified region.
Cyclone Xaver, also known as the North Sea flood or tidal surge of 2013, was a winter storm that affected northern Europe. Force 12 winds and heavy snowfall were predicted along the storm's path, and there were warnings of a significant risk of storm surge leading to coastal flooding along the coasts of the North and Irish Seas.
Cyclone Anne was a European windstorm which caused €75 million in damage across western Europe in early January 2014, followed days later by Cyclone Christina.
2013–2014 Atlantic winter storms in Europe were a series of winter storms affecting areas of Atlantic Europe and beyond. The French Atlantic coastal regions, South West and Southern England, West Wales, Ireland, Spanish Atlantic coastal regions were especially affected by a "conveyor belt" series of high-precipitation storms and by high tides. Many storms were explosively deepened by a strong jet stream, many deepening below 950 hPa. The repeated formation of large deep lows over the Atlantic brought storm surges and large waves which coincided with some of the highest astronomical tides of the year and caused coastal damage. The low pressure areas brought heavy rainfalls which led to flooding, which became most severe over parts of England such as at the Somerset Levels. The repeated storms fit into a pattern of disturbed weather in the Northern Hemisphere, which saw from November 2013 a disturbance to the jet stream in the western Pacific, which propagated eastwards bringing a warm winter to Alaska, drought to California, and repeated cold air outbreaks to the eastern USA where the early 2014 North American cold wave resulted.
The 2015–16 UK and Ireland windstorm season was the first instance of the United Kingdom's Met Office and Ireland's Met Éireann naming extratropical cyclones. The season started on 10 November with the naming of Storm Abigail and ended on 28 March with the dissipation of Storm Katie. With a total of eleven named storms, the 2015–16 season is the most active to date.
The 2015–2016 Great Britain and Ireland floods were a series of heavy rainfall events which led to flooding during the winter of late 2015 and early 2016. 11 named storms produced record level rainfall from November 2015 - March 2016 in both monthly and seasonal accumulation records.
Hannah Louise Cloke is a British hydrologist who is Professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading. She was awarded the European Geosciences Union Plinius Medal in 2018 and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 Birthday Honours.
Storm Dennis was a European windstorm which, in February 2020, became one of the most intense extratropical cyclones ever recorded, reaching a minimum central pressure of 920 millibars. The thirteenth named storm of the 2019–20 European windstorm season, Dennis affected the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom less than a week after Storm Ciara, exacerbating the impacts from that storm amidst ongoing flooding in the latter country.