Three international meetings on the RainGain project
by Wouter Koole / TU Delft
From the 6th to 8th October 2014, the RainGain project partners organised three international events in Exeter and in London, UK.
On the 6th of October the International Workshop on Urban Pluvial Flood Modelling was hosted by the Met Office in Exeter. The workshop was attended by more than one hundred people from research institutions as well as Local Authorities and industries from the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland. Each session consisted of three or four short talks, followed by an interactive panel discussion. The following topics were covered: 1. Modelling of urban storm water drainage systems and urban pluvial flooding, 2. Approaches and techniques for rapid urban pluvial (surface water) flood modelling, 3. Calibration, verification and uncertainty estimation of urban drainage/pluvial flood models, and 4. Operational urban pluvial flood models for real time applications. There were some challenging discussions between practitioners and scientists, for example about practical implementations of radar data at different temporal and spatial resolutions.
The following day was dedicated to the RainGain Consortium meeting that also took place at the Met Office premises. The project partners gave a summary and presented lessons learnt from all the work packages, followed up by interactive discussions.
The last day the partners gathered together for the Second RainGain Local Authorities Meeting held at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. The aim of the day was to build upon the Conference at MACVAL, Vitry-sur-Seine and develop the engagement of local governments with the RainGain project. The first part of the day was dedicated to policy discussion and the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU) presented their findings on governance of floods which led to interesting discussions among Local Authorities from UK as well as from France, Belgium and The Netherlands. Thereafter, in the second part of the conference, two cases of different implementations of X-band weather radars in Hamburg and in Dallas were presented by Katherina Lengfeld (Hamburg University) and Francesc Jungent (Colorado State University). In the evening, discussions and networking continued during a river cruise to the Thames Barrier.
One of the outcomes of these three enriching days will be a short article summarizing the main contents and conclusions of the scientific workshop.
