Accounting for Climate Change Uncertainty in Flood Hazard Prediction

洪水是世界范围内最常见和分布最广的生命和财产风险，自2000年以来给英国造成了价值超过45亿GB的损失。因此，管理洪水风险对当前和未来的政府都是一项重大挑战。根据欧盟洪水指令(2007/60/EC)的要求，英国的洪水风险地图必须在2013年12月之前交付。由于目前方法的局限性，这些地图采用确定性的方法来绘制集水区尺度的洪水风险图，并且没有纳入气候变化预测。据预测，气候预测将导致英国面临洪水和海岸侵蚀风险的房产增加：因此，了解这些给洪水风险带来的不确定性对英国具有重要的经济意义。通过研究和实践，已经形成了评估或确定洪水风险的不同方法。然而，这些都不允许将不确定性估计明确地包括在该过程中。虽然不确定性分析是多年来的一个研究领域，但由于多种原因，它尚未在洪水模型研究和决策中得到广泛应用。随着该领域的发展，如计算能力的提高和新获得的标准化气候数据集，将不确定性纳入评估正变得越来越可能，而且实际上是必要的。显然，目前在洪水风险预测方面的不确定性估计方面存在差距，特别是与气候变化预测有关的不确定性估计，这一研究领域对当前的政策和业务驱动因素至关重要。这项提议是为了全面解决这一差距而制定的。该项目将开发一个新的概率建模框架，以评估气候变化引起的不确定性对洪水风险预测的影响，为选定的案例研究流域生成样本概率洪水风险图，并试图量化气候预测对洪水风险的影响。

Floods are the most common and widely distributed natural risk to life and property worldwide, causing over £4.5B worth of damage to the UK since 2000. Managing flood risk therefore presents a substantial challenge to this and future governments. Arising from the requirements of the EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC), flood hazard maps for the UK must be delivered by December 2013. Due to limitations in current methodologies these maps take a deterministic approach to mapping catchment scale flood hazard, and do not incorporate climate change projections. Climate projections are predicted to result in the increase of UK properties at risk from flooding and coastal erosion: understanding the uncertainty these bring to flood hazard is therefore of vital economic significance to the UK.Different methods to assess or determine flood hazards have evolved through research and practice. However, these do not allow for uncertainty estimates to be explicitly included within the process. While uncertainty analysis has been an area of research over a number of years, it has not yet achieved widespread implementation in flood modelling studies and decision making for a number of reasons. With developments in the field, such as improved computational power and newly available standardised climate datasets, incorporating uncertainty into assessments is becoming increasingly possible and indeed essential.It is clear that a gap currently exists in uncertainty estimation in flood hazard prediction, particularly in relation to climate change projections, and that this area of research is critical to current policy and operational drivers. This proposal has been developed to comprehensively address this gap. The project will develop a novel probabilistic modelling framework to assess the impact of uncertainty arising from climate change on flood hazard predictions, generate exemplar probabilistic flood hazard maps for selected case study catchments and attempt to quantify the change to flood hazard as a result of climate projections.