February 2011
Halcrow is sponsoring Cranfield University’s new MSc Group Project. The flooding project will run for ten weeks and will involve 14 student’s working full-time on it. This is the first time that Cranfield has run the Group Project in this way.
The students will be given a scope of works from Halcrow acting as a client. The students will be required to organise their own teams, programme, and activities to successfully deliver the project in ten weeks.
Initial training will be given by Halcrow on specific methods and tools they will need to use and project direction will be provided by lectures at Cranfield University. Halcrow’s Kostya Vasilyev will act as the client project manager and will be providing support and direction.
The project will require the students to study a number of locations across the world based on where there is known to be historical flood risk and/or lack of data on flood risk.
The project will look to; examine the causal factors for surface water flooding from a widespread number of surface water flood events; develop a prototype web-based data system to capture and store the data which can also be used via social network channels; develop new surface water flood maps for a number of regions, and configure FloodViewer for each region studied.
Halcrow was instrumental in scoping a new rainfall alerting service for the Environment Agency (EA) that assists Category one and two emergency response partners in preparing for surface water flooding. Halcrow is now involved in a project to investigate possible criteria, as well as rainfall, that impact on surface water flood risk. This is being done with a view to moving towards a more impact based surface water flooding alert service, rather than purely rainfall based.
The first objective of the project aims to provide additional information which can help identify causal factors for surface water flooding events that have occurred in the last decade in the UK. To supplement ongoing projects and several product developments, the project also aims to develop a prototype web/social network based system to capture and store the data.
The second objective aims to develop new surface water flood maps. These maps have been generated for England and Wales; however there are significant limitations in these maps due to the approach adopted. This objective aims to identify the limitations of these maps and develop new surface water flood maps for a number of regions across the world using an alternative approach which uses Halcrow’s new ISIS-FAST software.
The last objective of the project is to configure FloodViewer for a number of regions. Halcrow has developed the new FloodViewer flood visualisation tool for use by CAT1 and CAT2 responders. It has recently been installed by the EA’s Flood Incident management teams (Midlands’s region) as an operational tool. The results of the surface water flood mapping are to be delivered as a FloodViewer solution for each of the regions that surface water maps are developed for. The solution will also integrate the existing flood zone maps for the same area (where available).