Description

This project is concerned with the relationship between rainfall and stream flow. There is considerable uncertainty as to the nature of this relationship and the way in which it changes with time and location. Understanding and quantifying this relationship is important for assessing the potential for flooding and the impact on flooding of changes in land use.

Members of the Durham Mathematics department (Michael Goldstein and Nathan Huntley), are part of a PURE (Probability, uncertainty and risk in the environment) consortium which is concerned with issues related to uncertainties associated with natural hazards. One aspect of this work involves working on problems related to rainfall run-off models, in collaboration with hydrologists at Imperial College. Our collaborators have implemented a particular rainfall runoff model, which runs in R. In addition, we have several time series of rainfall, stream flow and related quantities at various locations. This provides a rich collection of multi-variate spatio-temporal data.

This project is concerned with the analysis of the collection of rainfall-runoff data and the investigation of the relevance and accuracy of the computer simulator developed to study this data. A basic tool that we shall use is the statistical modelling of the relationship between the inputs and the outputs of the computer simulator, by means of a statistical emulator (which allows us to make fast, approximate evaluations of the model).

Prerequisites and Corequisitess

Resources

A good web-site which is related to the general types of analyses of uncertainty for computer models is

The MUCM Web-site

This is the web-site for the Managing Uncertainty in Complex Models (MUCM) project, another consortium in which we have been involved, (with the Universities of Sheffield, Aston, LSE and Southampton). In particular, there are many links to follow on the idea of emulation.

Details about the flood model that we will be using are given in this document

More details about the PURE project are given at

the home-page for the PURE research programme