To meet these challenges, the Universities of Hull and Southampton are leading the EvoFlood project – a 5-year collaborative endeavour across nine universities, which aims to make major advances in the science of predicting global flood hazard and risk by representing the dynamic evolution of river channels and their floodplains within GFMs.
The team bring combined skills in hydrology, channel-floodplain flow coupling, flooding and flood risk, and population dynamics and response to disaster events and modelling morphodynamics – how the interaction of rivers and their bed and banks change over time due to processes such as tide, flood, increased river flow and currents as well as manmade interventions such as flood barriers, flood plains and hard engineering.
We will develop an entirely new generation of Global Flood Models by:
- using Big Data sets and novel methods to enhance their representation of channel and floodplain morphology
- including new approaches to representing the evolution of channel morphology and channel-floodplain connectivity
- combining these developments with tools for projecting changes in catchment flow and sediment supply regimes over the 21st century.
These advances will enable us to deliver new understanding on how the feedbacks between climate, hydrology, and channel morphodynamics drive changes in flood conveyance and future flooding. Moreover, we will also connect our next generation GFM with innovative population models that are based on the integration of satellite, survey, cell phone and census data. We will apply the coupled model system under a range of future climate, environmental and societal change scenarios, enabling us to fully interrogate and assess the extent to which people are exposed, and dynamically respond, to evolving flood hazard and risk.
To help achieve our ambitious aims, the EvoFlood team will appoint a total of nine new researcher posts, covering many aspects of geomorphology, hydrology and numerical modelling.

Flooding in front of the United Bank of India, Dibrugarh, August 31, 2015. Photo courtesy of Arunabh0368 at Wikimedia Common
Lead Researchers:
Professor Daniel Parsons (PI)
Professor Stephen Darby (Co-PI), School of Geography & Environmental Science, University of Southampton
Professor Philip Ashworth, School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton
Dr Georgina Bennett, Geography, University of Exeter
Professor Hannah Cloke, Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading
Professor Richard Hardy, Geography, Durham University
Dr Julian Leyland, School of Geography & Environmental Science, University of Southampton
Dr Stuart McLelland, Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull
Dr Jeffrey Neal, Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Professor Andrew Nicholas, Geography, University of Exeter
Professor Gregory Sambrook Smith, School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
Dr Louise Slater, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
Professor Andrew Tatum, Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton
Dr Michael Wortmann, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford