Modelling catchment wide natural flood management interventions | WEBINAR

Hosted by the CIWEM Tyne & Humber branch 

Event description

This webinar will review models of catchment wide natural flood management interventions to enable quantification of in-town flood attenuation benefits using the case study of the Belford Natural Flood Management scheme.

Belford is a village in Northumberland, situated a few miles from the north east coast of England near Berwick-upon Tweed and is surrounded by rich pastoral farmland. During the 2000s the village suffered serious flooding causing significant damage to properties. In 2007 researchers from Newcastle University, the Environment Agency and local landowners started constructing numerous natural flood management interventions in the catchment upstream of Belford to mitigate against future flooding incidents.

The scheme included installation of runoff attenuation features, (RAFs) constructed within the catchment, together with leaky barriers, vegetated buffer strips and other NFM interventions. Following their installation, the catchment has been monitored to evaluate the impact of the scheme during a range of storm events on intercepting slowing and storing flood waters.

JBA Consulting have recently constructed a HEC-RAS 2D model of the whole rural catchment upstream of Belford to represent both the pre-NFM interventions and as-built NFM interventions scenarios. As part of this modelling, JBA have explored how the current condition and capacity of the RAFs within the upstream rural catchment is affecting the flood risk in the village and how this relates to the exact same catchment in a pre-intervention and brand new as-built condition. This type of modelling also poses questions surrounding how appropriate these modelling methods are when used to represent multiple distributed NFM interventions across a catchment.

Part of the CIWEM Land & Water Management digital series.

Booking and joining information

This event is open to members and non-members of CIWEM.

This webinar will be hosted on the Zoom platform and will be recorded. Please note that registrations will close 24 hours before the event starts. If you have not registered before that time, unfortunately we cannot add you to the event. You will receive an email with joining instructions after you have successfully registered for the webinar and the registration has been approved by our team. If you have any questions about your booking or would like to cancel your attendance, please contact barbara.woods@ciwem.org.

Please make sure you add this event to your calendar, all you need to do is copy the body text of the joining instruction email, go to your Calendar, create a new calendar appointment, set the start and end date and time, paste the text and click the "Save & Close" button.

If you have any queries about this talk, please contact Nicola Hyslop at Nicola.Hyslop@environment-agency.gov.uk.