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Improving Flood Prediction

New software is improving the accuracy with which we can detect and predict heavy rainfall, so we can better protect people and property from the effects of flooding.

Project partners

The Met Office

Background

The nine (soon to be ten) weather radars in England and Wales are a crucial part of our early warning system for flooding.

The data from these is gathered centrally at the Met Office in Exeter and then merged together to create a ‘composite’ image of precipitation. This is generated every five minutes and sent to the Environment Agency for use in flood forecasting and warning service. The quality of the rainfall data is affected by a number of factors and decreases the further away a location is from the radar sites.

Achievements

With Radarnet IV we have jointly invested with the Met Office in methods to get the best out of the data. We can now get much higher resolution information from the data just by improving the way that it’s processed.

The benefit for the Environment Agency – and so for the public who rely on us to predict and prepare for flooding – is that we are now able to see high intensity rainfall that we may have missed in the past and gauge its true extent and severity. This makes our management of floods much more efficient and effective.