Paper on flash flood responses using historical and gauged data methods wins Journal of Flood Risk Management Outstanding Paper Award 

The paper by D.R. Archer and H.J. Fowler (2018) “Characterizing flash flood response to intense rainfall and impacts using historical information and gauged data in Britain” has been chosen as the winner of this year’s award. The editors considered over 120 papers published in four regular and two supplementary issues of volume 11 of the journal.

The paper analyses chronologies of historical flash floods from searches of newspaper archives and other sources stretching back to before 1800, together with recent gauged rainfall and stream flow data. The authors outlined five key examples to illustrate specific features of British flash floods.

Particularly intense rainfall can generate ‘walls of water’ in river courses which can propagate long distances downstream and steepen, without upstream structural failure. River flash floods, like pluvial floods, also have the characteristic of rapid speed of response, which is a principal source of risk to life.

Four other papers have also been highly commended:

• Pluvial flooding in urban areas: the role of surface drainage efficiency by A Palla, M Colli, A Candela, GT Aronica, LG Lanza
• Multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar flood mapping using change detection by M.A. Clement C.G. Kilsby P. Moore
• Overcoming uncertainty and barriers to adoption of Blue-Green Infrastructure for urban flood risk management by C.R. Thorne E.C. Lawson C. Ozawa S.L. Hamlin L.A. Smith
• A conceptual approach for evaluating the multiple benefits of urban flood management practices by L. Hoang R.A. Fenner M. Skenderian

Journal of flood risk management provides an international platform for knowledge sharing in all areas related to flood risk. Its explicit aim is to disseminate ideas across the range of disciplines where flood related research is carried out and it provides content ranging from leading edge academic papers to applied content with the practitioner in mind.

The journal’s Editor-in-Chief Paul Samuels said;

“The winning and highly commended papers can be used as excellent examples for other authors; they all cover important aspects of flood risk management, they are well structured and written, with appropriate summaries and well-argued conclusions.”

All of the papers are now freely available to read on the journal website, you can also find more information and author guidelines here.