NERC Data Catalogue Service
Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE): Historical Rainfall Data and Maps from the Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions Project
The Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions Project is a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE) Research Programme project (Round 1 - NE/E002013/1 - Duration January 2007 - December 2008) led by Dr Patrick McSharry, University of Oxford. The dataset contains a collection of rainfall depth maxima data, dating back to 1860, plus associated description documents and rainfall maps of extreme events across the UK, have been used. All of these products have been digitised from the paper version of the British Rainfall publication, and are now archived at the BADC to enable easy access for future use and the wider community.
Floods in the UK are often caused by heavy rainfall lasting from minutes to weeks. Efficient management and mitigation of flood risk, especially surface water flooding in urban areas, requires accurate and reliable precipitation forecasts as inputs to flood risk models. Houses in flat areas are particularly at risk and meeting the shortage of houses in the south-east requires building on these areas. To estimate the flood hazard risk in order to try to protect these buildings, accurate rainfall predictions are needed. However, the connection between record rainfall and flooding is highly nonlinear, so that rainfall predictions must also say how likely rainfall is at any time - calculating the probability of rainfall.
Extreme rainfalls caused devastating floods in Boscastle in 2004 and Lynmouth in 1952, but the causes and pattern of rainfall was different. Therefore, scientists also need to know what pattern of rainfall caused the flooding.
This research aims to get good quality predictions of the probability of rainfall by combining advanced methods from statistics, the output from a new supercomputer model of the weather, and a new computer archive of exteme rainfalls going back to 1866 (and up to 1968), provided by a specialist company Hydro-GIS Ltd. It also aims to produce an automatic system for discovering the most likely pattern in the predicted rainfalls. The new prediction system and data will be freely available over the internet for use by the government and universities.
Simple
- Date (Publication)
- 2008-12-10T03:19:22
- Date (Creation)
- 2008-12-10T03:19:22
- Identifier
- NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC) / 108ec79af9ede50c5438d1b4574281da
- Maintenance and update frequency
- unknown Unknown
- Update scope
- series Series
- Keywords
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- FREE
- Rainfall
- Maps
- GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
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- atmospheric conditions
- Access constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- Please contact the data centre for assistance on accessing data from this dataset collection.
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Spatial representation type
- grid Grid
- Metadata language
- EnglishEnglish
- Topic category
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- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
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- Begin date
- 1867-01-01T00:00:00
- End date
- 1968-12-30T23:00:00
- Unique resource identifier
- WGS 84
- Distribution format
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Contact data centre for format details.
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Contact data centre for format details.
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- OnLine resource
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CEDA Data Catalogue Page
Detail and access information for the resource
- OnLine resource
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Flooding in north Cornwall - 16 August 2004
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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Hydro-GIS
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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A digital archive of extreme rainfalls in the British Isles from 1866 to 1968 based on British Rainfall
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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FREE Projects and Contacts
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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The science of flooding
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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Implementation Plan
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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Summary Progress Report May 2008
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- OnLine resource
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Other FREE Projects
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- OnLine resource
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Instructions for FREE data providers
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- OnLine resource
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An Overview of Extreme Rainfall Events from the British Rainfall Archive 1866-1968.
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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Data inputs to FREE projects
No further details.
- OnLine resource
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Progress Report October 2008
No further details.
- Hierarchy level
- series Series
Conformance result
- Date (Publication)
- 2010-12-08
- Statement
- Please see data lineage statements for each dataset within this collection for data lineage details.
- File identifier
- 108ec79af9ede50c5438d1b4574281da XML
- Metadata language
- EnglishEnglish
- Character set
- 8-bit variable size UCS Transfer Format, based on ISO/IEC 10646 UTF8
- Hierarchy level
- series Series
- Hierarchy level name
- series
- Date stamp
- 2025-11-15T03:26:36
- Metadata standard name
- UK GEMINI
- Metadata standard version
- 2.3
Overviews
Spatial extent
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