Name and acronym above are provisional :-) - Toby.


This research is part of UKCEH's response to the Climate & Land and Flood & Drought Impacts challenges of UKCEH's Science Challenges.

​Flash floods are critically important in dry monsoonal ecosystems. Although infrequent, these extreme events bring much-needed water in arid areas. However, they can also cause widespread damage, especially when the terrain is extremely flat (e.g. in some Australian catchments).

• Episodic floods like this lead to shallow, temporary inundation of surprisingly wide extent in particular catchments. When the inundation ultimately comes from precipitation then the dynamics of the situation is relatively well-known, but in many catchments inundation is received predominantly from coastal intrusion (i.e. coastal flooding) and this is much less reliably simulated.
• If the soil is armoured, then infiltration will be severely restricted, leading to ...
• Recent developments in high-resolution climate modelling have greatly improved our knowledge of precipitation (PRIMAVERA), however simulation of soil moisture dynamics remains approximate in many ecosystems.
• Impact?
• Relevance?
• What can we produce?

A new globalised coupled model approach has recently been developed through the CHAMFER project which provides new and much-improved ability to simulate the behaviour of such catchments (UM_JULES).
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