
Professor Paul Bates
CBE, B.Sc.(Soton), Ph.D.(Bristol), FRS
Expertise
Paul Bates is an expert in the science of flooding. He develops simulations models and combines these with satellite and airborne data to advance fundamental understanding and reduce threats to life and economic losses worldwide.
Current positions
Professor of Hydrology
School of Geographical Sciences
Contact
Media contact
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Research interests
Paul is a hydrologist by background, a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the American Geophysical Union, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder and in 2019 was awarded a CBE for services to flood risk management. He is also Chairman of the flood risk analytics company Fathom (www.fathom.global).
He has widespread research interests in risk, resilience, uncertainty, governance and decision-making in relation to natural hazards and global water issues. He is a double recipient of the Lloyd's of London Science of Risk prize and in 2015 he was awarded a 50th Anivversary Prize for Economic Impact by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council. He has published over 230 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, and these were cited over 2000 times in 2020 according to the ISI Web of Knowledge. He currently has an ISI H-index of 77 (or 97 on Google Scholar). 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. For videos of Paul talking about his research see here and 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.
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, Europe and Africa.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Climate and Environmental Risk Analytics for Resilient Finance (CERAF)
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/04/2021 to 31/03/2024
Climate and Environmental Risk Analytics for Resilient Finance (CERAF)
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/04/2021 to 31/03/2024
Climate and Environmental Risk Analytics for Resilient Finance (CERAF)
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/04/2021 to 31/03/2024
The UK contribution to validating SWOT in the Bristol Channel and River Severn, with application to coastal and river management
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/02/2021 to 31/01/2024
Thesis supervisions
Regional Flood Models and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Uncertainty
Supervisors
Suitability of TanDEM-X Data for Flood Inundation Modelling in Small Island Developing States
Supervisors
Linking climate, hydrological and hydrodynamic models to understand future flood hazard
Supervisors
Hydrometeorological characterisation of urban flash floods
Supervisors
Development and assessment of dynamic storage cell codes for flood inundation modelling
Supervisors
Understanding flood risk at large spatial scales
Supervisors
Bayesian calibration of flood inundation simulators using an observation of flood extent
Supervisors
Improving flood hazard mapping using global flood model and machine learning techniques
Supervisors
Publications
Selected publications
01/01/2010A simple inertial formulation of the shallow water equations for efficient two dimensional flood inundation modelling
Journal of Hydrology
A subgrid channel model for simulating river hydraulics and floodplain inundation over large and data sparse areas
Water Resources Research
Amazon flood wave hydraulics
Journal of Hydrology
Seasonal water storage on the Amazon floodplain measured from satellites
Remote Sensing of Environment
Applicability of the local inertial approximation of the shallow water equations to flood modelling
Water Resources Research
Recent publications
11/01/2023A climate-conditioned catastrophe risk model for UK flooding
Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
Bare-earth DEM Generation from ArcticDEM, and Its Use in Flood Simulation
Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
Co-occurring wintertime flooding and extreme wind over Europe, from daily to seasonal timescales
Weather and Climate Extremes
Towards a Framework of Catchment Classification for Hydrologic Predictions and Water Resources Management in the Ungauged Basin of the Congo River
Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry: A Foundation for the Future
Ambitious partnership needed for reliable climate prediction
Nature Climate Change