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Making water resource management decisions more robust and transparent

Martin Southwood CC BY-SA 2.0

31 August 2017

Developing coherent and formal approaches for water resource management that will exploit these new sources of information while tackling the challenges posed by environmental change and uncertainty.

Project title: Robust and transparent planning and operation of water resource infrastructure

Investigator:

  • Dr Francesca Pianosi, Department of Civil Engineering

Collaborators:

  • Wessex Water, HR Wallingford, ECMWF, JBA Trust

Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Funded amount: £884,000

Project descriptor:

Sustainable management of water resources is crucial to underpin population’s health and the economy while increasing resilience against hydro-meteorological hazards such as floods and droughts. In the UK, the water industry faces significant challenges due to increasing variability of hydrological conditions, changing patterns of water demand and the urgency of reconciling human needs with the protection of the natural environment.

My research aims to contribute towards more sustainable management of water resources by improving the way water infrastructures are planned and managed. To achieve this, I develop mathematical models that water resource managers can use to anticipate the effects of different planning and operational options, and hence make more informed decisions.

One challenge in this field is how to account for increasing levels of uncertainty in our decision-making models. Human-induced environmental change means that extreme events such as floods and droughts are becoming more frequent and unpredictable, while our ability of learning from historical observations is reduced. On the other hand, we now have access to an unprecedented flux of information from novel monitoring (for example satellites) and prediction systems (for example numerical weather prediction models) that could be exploited to improve water resource decisions.

In this project I aim to develop coherent and formal approaches for water resource management that will exploit these new sources of information while tackling the challenges posed by environmental change and uncertainty. These methods will produce actionable information to support both operational (short- term) and design (long-term) decisions in a robust and transparent way. All methods will be developed and tested on case study applications provided by water companies and they will be implemented in open-source software packages that will be shared across the community.

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