Professor Paul Bates

Summary

Paul is Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

PA: Amanda Woodman-Hardy (Amanda.Woodman-Hardy@bristol.ac.uk, +44 (0)117 954 5973)

Paul is a hydrologist by background, but has widespread research interests in risk, resilience, uncertainty, governance and decision-making in relation to natural hazards and global water issues.  He has published over 120 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, and these were cited over 650 times in 2012 according to the ISI Web of Knowledge. He currently has an ISI H-index of 34.  For a full publication list see here.

Paul's main science contribution has been to improve the prediction of flood inundation through the development of new computer models, the use of data from new airborne, satellite and ground sensors and through the better characterization of risk and uncertainty, and in 2012 he was awarded the Lloyd's Science of Risk prize for this work. A video of Paul talking about his research is available here.

He has held Visiting Scientist positions at Princeton University, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Laboratoire National d’Hydraulique, Paris, the EU Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is Editor in Chief of the International Journal of River Basin Management.

He also undertakes significant International collaboration, including work with the French National Space Agency (CNES), Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia in Brazil, as well as numerous universities in the US and Europe.

Biography

Paul obtained a BSc in Geography from Southampton University in 1989, and subsequently obtained a PhD from the University of Bristol in 1992 working with Professor Malcolm Anderson.  His PhD research analysed finite element methods for modeling flood flows, a theme he continued during postdoctoral research funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the UK Natural Environment Research Council and the Laboratoire Saint Venant in Paris where he worked with Jean-Michel Hervouet.  In 1995 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Physical Geography at the University of Bristol, and was promoted to Reader in 2000 and full Professor in 2003.  Since 2005 he has led the Hydrology Research Group in the School of Geographical Sciences and from February 2011 has been Director of the Cabot Institute.

Keywords

• Hydraulic Modelling
• Uncertainty
• Risk
• Remote Sensing
• Model-data comparison
• Natural Hazards
• Resilience
• Decision Making

Memberships

Organisations

School of Geographical Sciences

Research groups

• Cabot Institute
• Hydrology Group

Links

• LISFLOOD-FP model
• Bristol University | Cabot Institute
•   NASA Surface Water Ocean Topography mission
•   Willis Research Network
• NERC Storm Risk Mitigation programme
• PARNASSUS - Flood risk to historic buildings
• International Journal of River Basin Management

Selected publications

• Sampson, CC, Bates, PD, Neal, JC & Horritt, MS 2013, ‘An automated routing methodology to enable direct rainfall in high resolution shallow water models’. Hydrological Processes, vol 27., pp. 467-476
• Trigg, MA, Bates, PD, Wilson, MD, Schumann, GJ & Baugh, CA 2012, ‘Floodplain channel morphology and networks of the middle Amazon River’. Water Resources Research, vol 48.

Read more >

Recent publications

• Bates, PD 2013, ‘The LISFLOOD-FP flood inundation model’. University of Bristol
• Neal, J, Keef, C, Bates, P, Beven, K & Leedal, D 2013, ‘Probabilistic flood risk mapping including spatial dependence’. Hydrological Processes, vol 27., pp. 1349-1363
• Lewis, M, Bates, P, Horsburgh, K, Neal, JC & Schumann, G 2013, ‘A storm surge inundation model of the northern Bay of Bengal using publicly available data’. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, vol 139., pp. 358-369
• Aronica, G, Neal, JC, Candela, A & Bates, PD 2013, ‘On the influence of using binary and distributed information for 2D hydraulic model calibration and uncertainty evaluation’.
• Neal, J, Villanueva, I, Wright, N, Willis, T, Fewtrell, T & Bates, P 2012, ‘How much physical complexity is needed to model flood inundation?’. Hydrological Processes, vol 26., pp. 2264-2282
• Sampson, CC, Fewtrell, TJ, Duncan, A, Shaad, K, Horritt, MS & Bates, PD 2012, ‘Use of terrestrial laser scanning data to drive decimetric resolution urban inundation models’. Advances in Water Resources, vol 41., pp. 1-17
• Neal, J, Keef, C, Bates, P, Beven, K & Leedal, D 2012, ‘Probabilistic flood risk mapping including spatial dependence’. Hydrological Processes.
• Almeida, GAMd, Bates, P, Freer, JE & Souvignet, M 2012, ‘Improving the stability of a simple formulation of the shallow water equations for 2-D flood modeling’. Water Resources Research, vol 48.

View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system