Recent severe flooding around the UK coast is a stark reminder of the risks presented by storm surges – caused by a combination of high tides, winds and low pressure. The impacts on people, property and infrastructure, as recent events in Dawlish illustrate, can be significant. Storm surges, and their potential impacts, need to be understood by coastal managers, affected communities and all those with assets on the coastline. International flood and coastal engineering specialist HR Wallingford has developed SMARTtide, a state of the art tool that can now be used to predict storm surges in UK waters.
“Parts of the UK have recently experienced some of the highest storm surges since 1953,” says Graham Siggers, hydrodynamics and metocean group manager at HR Wallingford. “The challenge is to be able to provide accurate simulations of such events, either for forecasting, development planning, or to inform risk assessments. When it comes to simulating the local effects of storm surges, we have now further developed SMARTtide, a state of the art predictive tool originally set up for tidal resource assessment, to model storm surges in UK waters.”
Graham adds: “This new development of SMARTtide allows us to take meteorological predictions and look at the effects of storm surges in very fine detail (200m resolution) along the coastline or into estuaries. This means the model can simulate storm surges at a very localised level informing risk assessments for coastal planning or insurance.”
Developed by HR Wallingford, SMARTtide was originally commissioned and funded by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) to identify the most efficient sites for tidal energy converters, tidal arrays or tidal barrage schemes around the UK and French coastlines. The model continues to be used for this purpose and can now also be used for storm surge simulation.
More information on SMARTtide is available at http://www.hrwallingford.com/
About HR Wallingford
HR Wallingford is an independent engineering and environmental hydraulics organisation. We deliver practical solutions to complex water-related challenges faced by our international clients. A dynamic research programme underpins all that we do and keeps us at the leading edge. Our unique mix of know-how, assets and facilities includes state of the art physical modelling laboratories, a full range of numerical modelling tools and, above all, enthusiastic people with world-renowned skills and expertise.
About SMARTtide
The data that supports SMARTtide is the result of an earlier £450,000 ETI project, which was led by Black & Veatch, in collaboration with HR Wallingford and the University of Edinburgh. That project improved the understanding of the possible interactions between tidal energy extraction systems as they are deployed between now and 2050.