Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions

英国的洪水通常是由持续几分钟到几周的暴雨引起的。平坦地区的房屋尤其危险：为了满足东南部房屋的短缺，需要在这些地区建造房屋。为了估计洪水灾害的风险，试图保护这些建筑物，需要准确的降雨量预测。然而，降雨和洪水之间的联系是复杂的，因此降雨预测还必须说明在任何时候降雨的可能性——计算降雨的概率。极端降雨在2004年的波士顿和1952年的林茅斯造成了毁灭性的洪水，但降雨的原因和模式是不同的。因此，科学家们还需要知道是哪种降雨模式导致了洪水。这项研究的目的是通过结合先进的统计学方法、新的超级计算机天气模型的输出，以及由专业公司hydrogis Ltd.提供的可追溯到1860年的极端降雨的新计算机档案，获得高质量的降雨概率预测。它还旨在建立一个自动系统，以发现预测降雨中最可能的模式。新的预测系统和数据将在互联网上免费提供给政府和大学使用。

Floods in the UK are often caused by heavy rainfall lasting from minutes to weeks. Houses in flat areas are particularly at risk: 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 rainfall and flooding is complicated, 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 1860, 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.