Liz Stephens – HEPEX

The GloFAS Community Workshop – Supporting the Integration of Global Flood Forecasts Locally

May 24, 2016 Liz Stephens Comments 0 Comment

By Rebecca Emerton, Liz Stephens and Hannah Cloke On the 4th of May, delegates from across the world gathered at the University of Reading for the first Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) community workshop, aimed at supporting the integration of GloFAS forecasts into existing national and local forecasting capabilities. The workshop, led by Professor Hannah Cloke and Dr. Liz Stephens, included seminars, practical activities and discussion sessions. Participants of the full three-day workshop attended from the Servicio Nacional de Meteorología…

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El Niño leads to collaboration for developing ensemble flood forecasting in Peru

October 27, 2015 Liz Stephens Comments 0 Comment

Contributed by Liz Stephens, Beatriz Revilla-Romero and Juan Bazo The Forecast-based Financing (FbF) project for Peru was initially set-up to assist communities vulnerable to flooding on the River Amazon in Iquitos, and to cold-waves in Puno. However, the emergence of the strong El Nino event has focused attention on the northern regions of Piura and Lambayeque. The extraordinary El Niño events of 82/83 and 97/98 caused devastating flooding in these regions, and so naturally fears were raised of flooding during the…

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Introducing… Gemma Coxon

August 25, 2015 Liz Stephens Comments 5 comments

For the second ‘Introducing…’ blog post I invited Gemma Coxon to introduce herself and her work to the HEPEX community. Gemma is an early-career researcher at Bristol University. Liz: Hello! Can you introduce yourself in a couple of sentences? Gemma: Hi, my name is Gemma Coxon and I am a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Bristol working as part of the MaRIUS project (Managing the risks, impacts and uncertainties of droughts and water scarcities). Liz: How long have you been doing…

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Flood forecasting in the UK: what should we learn from the Winter 2013/14 floods?

November 28, 2014 Liz Stephens Comments 4 comments

Contributed by Liz Stephens and Hannah Cloke This is my final post as a HEPEX guest columnist 2014. I’ve decided to write with Hannah about a paper we co-wrote about the floods in the UK last winter. The full paper can be found here (paywall). It was very nice of the climate system to give HEPEX scientists in the UK two major flood events to learn from during HEPEX’s first decade. The Summer 2007 floods provided significant impetus for improvement…

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Linking flows to flood hazard

October 10, 2014 Liz Stephens Comments 4 comments

Contributed by Liz Stephens, a HEPEX guest columnist for 2014 With respect to flooding at least, to have value for decision-making we need to link the forecast of a particular magnitude river flow with the hazard posed by that size flow. When we are tasked with forecasting a flood, what is really meant is that there needs to be some indication of the area that will be flooded, and not only what is going on in the river channel. In practice, this…

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