Instructions for FREE data providers
Source: environment.data.gov.uk (2018-06-19)

Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE): Historical Rainfall Data and Maps from the Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions Project. The Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions Project is a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Flood Risk for Extreme Events (FREE) Research Programme project (Round 1 - NE/E002013/1 - Duration January 2007 - December 2008) led by Dr Patrick McSharry, University of Oxford. The dataset contains a collection of rainfall depth maxima data, dating back to 1860, plus associated description documents and rainfall maps of extreme events across the UK, have been used. All of these products have been digitised from the paper version of the British Rainfall publication, and are now archived at the BADC to enable easy access for future use and the wider community.

Floods in the UK are often caused by heavy rainfall lasting from minutes to weeks. Efficient management and mitigation of flood risk, especially surface water flooding in urban areas, requires accurate and reliable precipitation forecasts as inputs to flood risk models. Houses in flat areas are particularly at risk and meeting the shortage of houses in the south-east requires building on these areas. To estimate the flood hazard risk in order to try to protect these buildings, accurate rainfall predictions are needed. However, the connection between record rainfall and flooding is highly nonlinear, so that rainfall predictions must also say how likely rainfall is at any time - calculating the probability of rainfall.

Extreme rainfalls caused devastating floods in Boscastle in 2004 and Lynmouth in 1952, but the causes and pattern of rainfall was different. Therefore, scientists also need to know what pattern of rainfall caused the flooding.

This research aims to get good quality predictions of the probability of rainfall by combining advanced methods from statistics, the output from a new supercomputer model of the weather, and a new computer archive of exteme rainfalls going back to 1866 (and up to 1968), provided by a specialist company Hydro-GIS Ltd. It also aims to produce an automatic system for discovering the most likely pattern in the predicted rainfalls. The new prediction system and data will be freely available over the internet for use by the government and universities.

FREE - Instructions to Data Providers
- to have registered as a BADC user and got a password — if you are not a BADC registered user, please register here (/reg/user_register_info.html); if you are a BADC registered user but have forgotten your user ID and/or password, please ask help from the BADC support desk at xxx@xxx.xx (mailto:xxx@xxx.xx);
- to have been granted access to the FREE archive — if you do not yet have access to the FREE archive (/cgi-bin/data_browser/data_browser/badc/free/), please apply here (/cgi-bin/dataset_registration/dataset_info.cgi.pl?datasetid=free).
The BADC is encouraging all FREE projects to deliver data in either NetCDF (/help/formats/netcdf/) (binary) or NASA Ames (/help/formats/NASA-Ames/) (ASCII) format. To ensure the future usability of the data, it is important to include all necessary information about the data with the file. This is termed metadata (/data/ufam/metadata.html). The data files submitted should conform to the Climate and Forecasts (CF) Metadata Convention (/help/formats/netcdf/index_cf.html). If you wish to check that files are correctly formatted before uploading them please use the NetCDF format checker (http://titania.badc.rl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/cf-checker.pl) or NASA-Ames format checker (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dataex_file.cgi.pl).

Advice on standardising filenames is provided on the file-naming convention page (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/help/file_naming.html) along with a list of common names (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/filespec_doc?id=INSTRUMENTAL&hfile=1) used for instruments, locations etc. in filenames.
- Uploading data Data providers can upload their data files directly from their home computer into the BADC incoming directory, via the BADC Web based file uploader (../upload.html). This device can also be used to submit software and text files containing metadata or any relevant information on the project deliverables. Please have your BADC user ID and password handy. You will be asked to select the appropriate subdirectory (please refer to the list below). / incoming / free / ... PI NERC Ref. Project name /incoming/free/NE-E002137-1_flood_forecasting (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002137-1_flood_forecasting) Prof AJ Illingworth, University of Reading NE/E002137/1 Exploitation of new data sources, data assimilation and ensemble techniques for storm and flood forecasting (/data/free/forecasting.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002048-1_changing_coastlines (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002048-1_changing_coastlines) Dr Sarah Dance, University of Reading NE/E002048/1 Changing coastlines: data assimilation for morphodynamic prediction and predictability (/data/free/coastlines.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002129-1_EPIRUS (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002129-1_EPIRUS) Dr Q Zou, University of Plymouth NE/E002129/1 Ensemble Prediction of Inundation Risk and Uncertainty arising from Scour (EPIRUS) (/data/free/epirus.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002439-1_GridStix (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002439-1_GridStix) Prof Keith Beven, Lancaster University NE/E002439/1 Local flood forecasting capability for fluvial and estuarine floods: Use of GridStix for constraining uncertainty in predictive models (/data/free/gridstix.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002307-1_modelling_groundwater (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002307-1_modelling_groundwater) Prof H Wheater, Imperial College London NE/E002307/1 Modelling groundwater flood risk in the Chalk aquifer from future extreme rainfall events (/data/free/groundwater.html) /incoming/free/NE-F001134-1_land_use_management (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-F001134-1_land_use_management) Professor PE O'connell, Newcastle University NE/F001134/1 Land Use Management Effects in Extreme Floods (/data/free/landuse.html) /incoming/free/NE-F001037-1_exploratory_study (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-F001037-1_exploratory_study) Dr C Svensson, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology NE/F001037/1 A data-driven exploratory study of extreme events based on joint probability analysis (/data/free/explore.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002013-1_density_forecasts (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002013-1_density_forecasts) Dr PE McSharry, University of Oxford NE/E002013/1 Quantifying Flood Risk of Extreme Events using Density Forecasts Based on a New Digital Archive and Weather Ensemble Predictions (/data/free/quantifying.html) /incoming/free/NE-F011822-1_hybrid_model (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-F011822-1_hybrid_model) Professor R Toumi, Imperial College London NE/F011822/1 A hybrid model for predicting the probablity of very extreme rainfall (/data/free/hybridmodel.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002412-1_changing_precipitation_extremes (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002412-1_changing_precipitation_extremes) Dr TJ Osborn, University of East Anglia NE/E002412/1 Identification of changing precipitation extremes and attribution to atmospheric, oceanic and climatic changes (/data/free/identification.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002242-1_flood_inundation_impacts (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002242-1_flood_inundation_impacts) Prof GR McGregor, King's College London NE/E002242/1 Uncertainty Assessments of Flood Inundation Impacts: Using spatial climate change scenarios to drive ensembles of distributed models for extremes (/data/free/fii.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002420-1_FRACAS (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002420-1_FRACAS) Mr N Reynard, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology NE/E002420/1 FRACAS: a next generation national Flood Risk Assessment under climate ChAnge Scenarios (/data/free/fracas.html) /incoming/free/NE-E002471-1_CoFEE (/cgi-bin/fileuploader/FREE_file_type_selection.cgi.pl?directory=%2Fincoming%2Ffree%2FNE-E002471-1_CoFEE) Prof J Williams, University of Plymouth NE/E002471/1 Coastal Flooding by Extreme Events (CoFEE) (/data/free/cofee.html)