About Drought Handbook: Outputs & Impacts
As the UK’s £12m Drought and Water Scarcity (DWS) research programme reaches its conclusion with a final event at The Royal Society in London, this handbook draws together the key outputs and outcomes. The book also features a series of interviews with our leading stakeholders, which highlight how successfully we have met our objectives to produce cutting-edge science that has made a demonstrable impact on how decision-makers manage water scarcity in the UK.
As the UK’s £12m Drought and Water Scarcity (DWS) research programme reaches its conclusion with a final event at The Royal Society in London, this handbook draws together the key outputs and outcomes. The book also features a series of interviews with our leading stakeholders, which highlight how successfully we have met our objectives to produce cutting-edge science that has made a demonstrable impact on how decision-makers manage water scarcity in the UK.
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RESOURCES<br />
THE UK WATER<br />
RESOURCES PORTAL<br />
The UK Water Resources Portal was launched in September 2019 and is<br />
a web-based system tracking the latest hydrological situation in near realtime<br />
across England, Wales and Scotland.<br />
Matt Fry, Environmental Informatics<br />
Manager, at the Centre for<br />
Ecology & Hydrology (CEH)<br />
says: “The different iterations<br />
of its development have been<br />
demonstrated at a number of<br />
our <strong>About</strong> <strong>Drought</strong> workshops,<br />
including those focussed on the<br />
water industry, and they have really<br />
helped us to develop our thinking<br />
around how to best display near<br />
real-time water resources status<br />
information.”<br />
https://eip.ceh.ac.uk/hydrology/water-resources<br />
THE<br />
DROUGHT<br />
PORTAL<br />
https://eip.ceh.ac.uk/apps/<br />
droughts/<br />
The UK <strong>Drought</strong> Portal is a near<br />
real-time tool allowing users<br />
to explore up-to-date data and<br />
monitor current regional dry<br />
weather status across the UK.<br />
It went live in 2015 based on<br />
earlier work and understanding<br />
of user requirements for historic<br />
drought information. It is<br />
focused on standardised drought<br />
indicators and enables consistent<br />
comparison of different areas<br />
regardless of how wet they are.<br />
It was used in 2018 as a tool<br />
for communicating complex<br />
water data comparisons to help<br />
decision-makers understand<br />
current water resources against<br />
drought conditions.<br />
What does it do?<br />
The Water Resources portal makes<br />
use of very recently published<br />
real-time river flow data from the<br />
Environment Agency (EA) and puts it<br />
in the context of longer term water<br />
availability, using data from the CEH<br />
National River Flow Archive, including<br />
knowledge about drought indicators<br />
that have been developed through the<br />
<strong>About</strong> <strong>Drought</strong> programme.<br />
It includes standardised Indicators,<br />
but allows users to switch to actual<br />
values, which can make them easier to<br />
understand.<br />
Matt adds: “The availability of this realtime<br />
data is a new frontier in public<br />
access to water data. We have made<br />
this even more useful by providing<br />
background context, for example an<br />
understanding of how today’s river<br />
flow is low compared to its long<br />
term record. It allows a consistent<br />
set of water resources metrics to be<br />
available to everyone and it does this<br />
through a very easy to use intuitive<br />
interface, visualising the current water<br />
resources in an easy to understand<br />
set of maps and graphs.<br />
“It also enables the more technical<br />
user to delve into the detail of what<br />
is going on in real time in England. For<br />
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland<br />
it is based on the previous month’s<br />
44<br />
data but we hope that the monitoring<br />
agencies there will be moving towards<br />
real-time data soon and we are keen<br />
to include it. You can also see what the<br />
rainfall has been like and compare the<br />
two graphs.”<br />
Who is it for?<br />
You do not need technical skills<br />
to use the UK Water Resources<br />
Portal. Anyone with an interest in<br />
current water resources or drought<br />
conditions can use it – from policymakers<br />
to members of the public,<br />
businesses to farmers and regulators<br />
to consultants.<br />
It has a green to red scale of alerts<br />
based on the EA’s water situation<br />
reports.<br />
What difference does it make?<br />
Matt says: “It really helps to raise<br />
awareness of the status of river flows<br />
and rainfall, particularly during<br />
drought episodes, and we believe<br />
it is an excellent communications<br />
tool for all sorts of end users and<br />
decision makers.”<br />
At the time of writing, the portal is in<br />
a demonstrator stage, with more fine<br />
tuning to be completed. Matt says: “In<br />
time we think it will supercede the<br />
<strong>Drought</strong> Portal.”
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