Supervisors: Gianni Vesuviano (UKCEH), Justin Sheffield (UoS), Adam Griffin (UKCEH), Gemma Coxon (UoB), Jamie Hannaford (UKCEH) Sean Longfield (EA)
Contact email: giaves@ceh.ac.uk
Location: Southampton
Project Rational: Floods have been identified as one of the most dangerous hazards in the UK causing potentially billions of pounds of economic and social damage per year. Flood risk is becoming an increasing concern as studies suggest that flood frequency and magnitude are changing over time in the UK, with events that would have been rare in the recent past seeming to become less rare now.
While the most recent major UK flood episode in late 2023/early 2024 saw some extreme peak flows, it was also remarkable for its repeated nature (with a relentless series of extreme storms, including ‘Ciaran’ and ‘Henk’), spatial extent, and duration. Other recent episodes (e.g. 2019/2020) have also seen repeated flooding and wide spatial footprints. Traditional assessments of flood severity, and of long-term trends in floods, are based on peak flow magnitude, but there is a pressing need to better understand other flood signatures like duration, total volume and spatial extent, how they are changing, and for what reasons. Capturing the likelihood of simultaneous flooding events is also crucial for developing tools for resource allocation in emergency response to flooding.
Methodology: This PhD will exploit a novel dataset that captures detailed information on flood characteristics (signatures), including flood duration, total volume and rate-of-rise, catchment properties, and event rainfall, from over 90,000 events and 700 catchments. Using a subset of catchments with high data quality, trends in flood signatures will be identified through non-stationary statistical methods such as GAMLSS models, after grouping events into similar families (e.g. intense convective storms in urban catchments). Co-occurrence of trends in flood signatures will be investigated, applying spatial clustering to identify locations with similar trends in flood signatures. Rainfall, land-use change (UKCEH Land Cover Maps), and atmospheric circulation indices (moving beyond simple indices like the North Atlantic Oscillation and towards underlying air pressure and sea-surface temperature fields) will be investigated as covariates to link event signatures to meteorological and anthropogenic changes in the study catchments, disentangling land-use change and regional climatic change impacts, and presenting opportunities to explore potential impacts of climate-change driven changes in flood signatures. Regional responses to a changing climate could be considered with respect to flood durations, volumes, rate-of-rise, or sequencing/clustering, offering a huge advance on current approaches that largely focus on changes in peak flows only.
Background Reading:
- Zheng, Y., Coxon, G., Woods, R., Li, J. and Feng, P. (2023). Controls on the spatial and temporal patterns of rainfall-runoff event characteristics‐a large sample of catchments across Great Britain. Water Resources Research, e2022WR033226.
- Hannaford, J., Mastrantonas, N., Vesuviano, G. and Turner, S. (2021). An updated national-scale assessment of trends in UK peak river flow data: how robust are observed increases in flooding? Hydrology Research 52, 699-718.
- Griffin, A., Vesuviano, G. and Stewart, E. (2019). Have trends changed over time? A study of UK peak flow data and sensitivity to observation period. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 19, 2157-2167.
FLOOD-CDT
This PhD is being advertised as part of the Centre for Doctoral Training for Resilient Flood Futures (FLOOD-CDT). Further details about FLOOD-CDT can be seen here https://flood-cdt.ac.uk. Please note, that your application will be assessed upon: (1) Motivation and Career Aspirations; (2) Potential & Intellectual Excellence; (3) Suitability for specific project and (4) Fit to FLOOD-CDT. So please familiarise yourselves with FLOOD-CDT before applying. During the application process candidates will need to upload:
• a 1 page statement of your research interests in flooding and FLOOD-CDT and your rationale for your choice of project;
• a curriculum vitae giving details of your academic record and stating your research interests;
• name two current academic referees together with an institutional email addresses; on submission of your online application your referees will be automatically emailed requesting they send a reference to us directly by email;
• academic transcripts and degree certificates (translated if not in English) - if you have completed both a BSc & an MSc, we require both; and
• a IELTS/TOEFL certificate, if applicable.
Please upload all documents in PDF format. You are encouraged to contact potential supervisors by email to discuss project-specific aspects of the proposed prior to submitting your application. If you have any general questions please contact floodcdt@soton.ac.uk.
Apply
To apply for this project please click here: https://student-selfservice.soton.ac.uk/BNNRPROD/bzsksrch.P_Search. Tick programme type - Research, tick Full-time or Part-time, select Academic year – ‘2025/26, Faculty Environmental and Life Sciences’, search text – ‘PhD Ocean & Earth Science (FLOOD CDT)’.
In Section 2 of the application form you should insert the name of the project and supervisor(s) you are interested in applying for.
If you have any problems please contact: fels-pgr-apply@soton.ac.uk.
