Recipient organisationCentre for Ecology & Hydrology
Funding£4.4M
PeriodMar 2023 — Mar 2027
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Floods and droughts are becoming more severe and unpredictable, and current computer models cannot keep up. The Hydro-JULES-Next project will build a new generation of hydrological models that link rainfall, rivers, groundwater, and the atmosphere together in unprecedented detail. This matters because the UK’s water infrastructure—flood defences, reservoirs, drainage systems—was designed for a climate that no longer exists. The Climate Change Committee has warned that existing flood risk assessments are inadequate. Meanwhile, the push for Net Zero will change how land is used, which in turn alters how water moves through the landscape. No current model can account for all these interacting factors at once. If successful, the project will give the Environment Agency, Met Office, and Flood Forecasting Centre tools to produce more accurate flood warnings days or weeks ahead, and to plan water resources during prolonged drought. The models will also help predict how changes like mass tree planting or new crops affect water availability. All code and data will be released openly, so universities and private firms can build their own applications. The project is applied science with a clear practical goal: better predictions that save lives and money.
View original technical description
As recent floods in Australia and Pakistan and prolonged severe drought in the UK, USA, and East Africa show, the water cycle is a key driver of environmental change in the 21st century. The UK's commitment to Net Zero by 2050 and the COP26-inspired Glasgow Breakthrough Goals challenge scientists to quantify the risks and impacts of anthropogenic warming and environmental change on hydrological extremes, and to provide more precise estimates of hydro-meteorological hazards and the availability of water resources worldwide. The Climate Change Committee's Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk has stressed the importance of accurate assessments of current and future flood risk, and stimulated innovation to provide better predictions of floods across all time-scales. The Hydro-JULES-Next project will provide underpinning science to address these challenges. This project will undertake a comprehensive programme of work aimed at building new modelling infrastructure to understanding floods and water scarcity in the UK and overseas. We will develop innovative approaches to assimilating data into the latest coupled hydrological and atmosphere models, to develop a new understanding of hydrological extremes. We will conduct state-of-the-art analyses of the effects of climate and land cover change on the water cycle in the UK and beyond and we will make our results, and the technology used to produce them, freely available to beneficiaries in universities, public sector research organisations, and the private sector so that they can develop advanced solutions tailored to their own needs. Working closely with our research and implementation partners in the Environment Agency, Met Office, and Flood Forecasting Centre, among others, we will develop model capability that can deliver solutions to provide next-generation seamless environmental prediction, improve water resources planning and flood guidance statements, and help understand the response of hydrological systems to land cover change associated with the pursuit of net zero carbon emissions.
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