Improved accuracy and lead times of flood warnings: rainfall radar merging
A project to develop a new rainfall product using merged rain-gauge data and data from the radar network in near real time to improve the accuracy and lead times of flood warnings.
Documents
An assessment of kriging-based rain-gauge-radar merging techniques
The development of a real time gauge QC and gauge-radar merging scheme for England and Wales
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Details
This research contributed to a larger project that aimed to improve the accuracy and lead time of flood warnings by developing a new rainfall software.
Approach
This new software uses rain-gauge data from the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and the Met Office in real time, combined with data from the radar network. It produces a spatial picture of rainfall in as near to real time as possible.
This helps provide more accurate information about how much rain has fallen during a flood event. This information can be fed into river forecasting models to improve the accuracy and speed of river forecasts. This will result in better flood warnings.
Quality control of the rain-gauge data was an important step in the process to create the new software. An automated process was developed to quality control rain-gauge data in near real time. This highlights where there may be suspected problems with rain-gauges so that issues can be investigated.
Next steps
It’s expected that this merged product will feed into the Environment Agency and Flood Forecasting Centre river flood forecasting models at both national and local levels. The Met Office is likely to use the merged product to help verify its rainfall forecasting products.
This project ran from 2010 to 2016.