Author Archives: Richard Maxey

Storm Desmond – Scotland’s first red flood risk

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Richard Maxey

Over the weekend of 5 – 6 December 2015 Storm Desmond – the fourth UK named storm of the winter season – brought damaging winds and heavy rain across Scotland, which experienced its most severe flood event since the advent … Continue reading →

Posted in Flood, Forecasting, G2G, Uncategorized, Weather prediction | 2 Comments

Heavy Rainfall Alerts – latest advances

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Richard Maxey

In order to provide probabilistic forecasts of flooding from surface water the forecasting service has been using a Heavy Rainfall Alert (HRA) tool since 2013, as discussed in a previous article. The tool consists of a spreadsheet that is updated … Continue reading →

Posted in Forecasting, Probabilistic, Risk communication, Surface Water | Leave a comment

Surface Water Flooding in Aberdeen

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Richard Maxey

As noted in previous articles surface water flooding can be challenging to forecast. On Tuesday 7th July a period of intense rainfall over Aberdeen and the surrounding area led to significant surface water flooding. The forecasting service was able to … Continue reading →

Posted in Flood, Forecasting, Surface Water | 2 Comments

The European Flood Awareness System – 2015 annual meeting

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Richard Maxey

Last month I attended the 10th annual partners meeting of the European Flood Awareness System, of which the forecasting service is a member. EFAS provides forecasts across Europe, using a gridded LISFLOOD model fed by deterministic and probabilistic rainfall forecasts from ECMWF. Alerts … Continue reading →

Posted in Conference, Forecasting, Partnerships, Research | Leave a comment

Grid-to-Grid performance during a hydrologically significant event in the North West

Posted on March 13, 2015 by Richard Maxey

Following the West Highland heavy rainfall event of last October the forecasting service recently had to again respond to a forecast of potentially extreme rainfall in a similar area over the past few days. The rainfall event was well forecast with … Continue reading →

Posted in Flood, Forecasting, G2G, Risk communication | 1 Comment

The December ‘weather bomb’ – over-warned or better prepared?

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Richard Maxey

Recently the flood forecasting service had to contend with the potential impacts of the so called weather bomb. Explosive cyclogenesis – a weather phenomenon which results in rapidly deepening low pressure – occured to the south of Greenland and gave rise … Continue reading →

Posted in Coastal, Forecasting, Risk communication | 1 Comment

Extreme(?) rainfall in the West Highlands – a flood forecasting challenge

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Richard Maxey

Over the past few days the forecasting service has faced an interesting challenge. Large amounts of rain were forecast to fall in north west Scotland, caused by warm moist air being driven by gale force winds over the high ground … Continue reading →

Posted in Flood, Forecasting, Risk communication, Weather prediction | 2 Comments

Staying alert in rain or shine

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Richard Maxey

Last summer our Met Office coordinator Pete Buchanan produced a couple of articles about surface water flooding. In the second article he explained how our Heavy Rainfall Alert (HRA) Tool works. Here he gives us an update on further development of … Continue reading →

Posted in Flood, Forecasting, Probabilistic, Risk communication, Surface Water, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Tracking medium range flow forecasts from day to day

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Richard Maxey

One of the challenges we face in the forecasting service when looking at flow outputs modelled from high resolution rainfall forecasts is knowing when to act – Just because we see a realistic looking peak on a forecast at day … Continue reading →

Posted in Flood, Forecasting, G2G, Hydrology, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Forecasting with higher resolution rainfall forecasts; this winter’s first test

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Richard Maxey

The flood forecasting service has been using Met Office ‘BestData’ rainfall forecasts in its hydrological forecasts since summer 2013. For deterministic forecasts this is a fairly straightforward amalgamation of gridded 1.5km UKV to 36 hours, and 4km Euro4 data out to 120 … Continue reading →

Posted in Forecasting, G2G, Probabilistic, Risk communication, Uncategorized | 1 Comment