StopFloods

The StopFloods4.ie Project

The Challenge

Floods are amongst the most common and deadly weather-related natural disasters. In 2024 floods caused the deaths of more than 8700 people across the globe. In addition to direct damages and fatalities, flooding also causes disruptions to business activity and to people’s everyday lives. Those with personal experience of flooding describe the stress and trauma of living with flood risk. Moreover, climate change is expected to increase the risk of flooding in many regions worldwide over the coming decades, potentially threatening sustainable development at the local scale.  These risks are particularly concentrated in the many densely populated low-lying coastal cities around the world that are often prone to compound flood risks from rivers, rainfall and the sea.  

The StopFloods4.ie project team understands that there is an urgent need both locally and globally to understand better the dynamics of floods and to provide measures and methods to manage flood risks effectively and efficiently both now and in the future. Flood forecasting systems are crucial tools for preventing flood damage and for reducing the risks posed by flooding to people’s lives and livelihoods. However, given the technical complexity of modelling and predicting flooding at the local scale, developing reliable forecasting systems and integrating these into real-time decision-making processes remains extremely challenging.

Through extensive stakeholder engagement, the StopFloods team has gained valuable insights on the nature of the challenges facing those tasked with managing and responding to extreme weather events at the city scale. Any decision-support tool for managing the risks from flooding, at a minimum, needs to provide forecast information at a local scale in a timely and consistent manner. The system also needs to be robust to potentially changing risk profiles over time (due to climate change or other factors), to staffing changes in the organisations tasked with managing flood risks, and to events that occur outside of normal working hours.

The Solution

The StopFloods4.ie project  is developing a novel flood forecasting system for prediction of compound coastal-fluvial flood events at the highly local scale and in real-time. Our multidisciplinary team combines researchers from diverse scientific backgrounds, including engineering, natural sciences, data science, and economics. The new system being developed uses state-of-the-art solutions from across these disciplines, including: IOT (internet of things), statistics, hydrodynamic modelling, and machine learning techniques. Prototyping of the system is already underway involving close collaboration between the research team and key decision-makers at the city level in Ireland.  The research team is also working closely with representatives from other key stakeholders with responsibility for monitoring, forecasting and managing flood risks in Ireland, including the OPW, the Marine Institute, and Met Éireann (the project’s Societal Impact Champions).

Beyond the scientific value, the project directly benefits society by mitigating flood risks in flood prone areas, increasing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of flood risk management systems, and ultimately increasing the safety and security of the general population in flood prone areas.