Shaun Harrigan

European Center For Medium Range Weather Forecasts · Forecast Department

Skilful hydrological forecasts at sub-seasonal to seasonal lead times would be extremely beneficial for decision-making in water resources management, hydropower operations, and agriculture, especially during drought conditions. Ensemble streamflow prediction (ESP) is a well-established method for generating an ensemble of streamflow forecasts in t...

Climate change has led to concerns about increasing river floods resulting from the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere¹. These concerns are reinforced by evidence of increasing economic losses associated with flooding in many parts of the world, including Europe². Any changes in river floods would have lasting implications for th...

Abstract. Abstract. Estimating how much water is flowing through rivers at the global scale is challenging due to a lack of observations in space and time. A way forward is to optimally combine the global network of earth system observations with advanced numerical weather prediction (NWP) models to generate consistent spatio-temporal maps of land,...

Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Commission, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter referred to as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span fr...

Operational global-scale hydrological forecasting systems are used to help manage hydrological extremes such as floods and droughts. The vast amounts of raw data that underpin forecast systems and the ability to generate information on forecast skill have, until now, not been publicly available. As part of the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS;...

Global hydrological reanalyses are modelled datasets providing information on river discharge evolution everywhere in the world. With multi‐decadal daily timeseries, they provide long‐term context to identify extreme hydrological events such as floods and droughts. By covering the majority of the world's land masses, they can fill the many gaps in...

Floods are one of the most common natural disasters, with a disproportionate impact in developing countries that often lack dense streamflow gauge networks¹. Accurate and timely warnings are critical for mitigating flood risks², but hydrological simulation models typically must be calibrated to long data records in each watershed. Here we show that...

Megafloods that far exceed previously observed records often take citizens and experts by surprise, resulting in extremely severe damage and loss of life. Existing methods based on local and regional information rarely go beyond national borders and cannot predict these floods well because of limited data on megafloods, and because flood generation...

Floods are one of the most common and impactful natural disasters, with a disproportionate impact in developing countries that often lack dense streamflow monitoring networks. Accurate and timely warnings are critical for mitigating flood risks, but accurate hydrological simulation models typically must be calibrated to long data records in each wa...

The unprecedented progress in ensemble hydro‐meteorological modelling and forecasting on a range of temporal and spatial scales, raises a variety of new challenges which formed the theme of the Joint Virtual Workshop, ‘Connecting global to local hydrological modelling and forecasting: challenges and scientific advances’. Held from 29 June to 1 July...

Seasonal precipitation forecasting is highly challenging for the northwest fringes of Europe due to complex dynamical drivers. Hybrid dynamical–statistical approaches offer potential to improve forecast skill. Here, hindcasts of mean sea level pressure (MSLP) from two dynamical systems (GloSea5 and SEAS5) are used to derive two distinct sets of ind...

Knowledge of the key drivers of the severity of river flooding from tropical cyclones (TCs) is vital for emergency preparedness and disaster risk reduction activities. This global study examines landfalling TCs in the decade from 2010 to 2019 to identify those characteristics that influence whether a storm has an increased flood hazard. The highest...

Skilful hydrological forecasts can benefit decision-making in water resources management and other water-related sectors that require long-term planning. In Ireland, no such service exists to deliver forecasts at the catchment scale. In order to understand the potential for hydrological forecasting in Ireland, we benchmark the skill of ensemble str...

Hydroclimatic extremes such as intense rainfall, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wind or storms have devastating effects each year. One of the key challenges for society is understanding how these extremes are evolving and likely to unfold beyond their historical distributions under the influence of multiple drivers such as changes in climate, lan...

Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Commission, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the 5th generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter named as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span from 1950 to pre...

Precipitation is a key component of the global water cycle and plays a crucial role in flooding, droughts, and water supply. One way to manage its socioeconomic effects is based on precipitation forecasts from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, and an important step to improve precipitation forecasts is by diagnosing NWP biases. In this stu...

Riverine plastic pollution is of global concern due to its negative impact on ecosystem health and human livelihood. Recent studies show a strong link between river discharge and plastic transport, but the role of floods is still unresolved. We combined high resolution mismanaged plastic waste data and river flood extents with increasing return per...

Benchmarking seasonal forecasting skill using river flow persistence in Irish catchments This study assesses the seasonal forecast skill of river flow persistence in 46 catchments representing a range of hydrogeological conditions across Ireland. Skill is evaluated against a climatology benchmark forecast and by examining correlations between predi...

Skilful hydrological forecasts can benefit decision-making in water resources management and other water-related sectors that require long-term planning. In Ireland, no such service exists to deliver forecasts at the catchment scale. In order to understand the potential for hydrological forecasting in Ireland, we benchmark the skill of Ensemble Str...

Hydroclimatic extremes such as intense rainfall, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wind/storms have devastating effects each year. One of the key challenges for society is understanding how these extremes are evolving and likely to unfold beyond their historical distributions under the influence of multiple drivers such as changes in climate, land c...

Operational global-scale hydrological forecasting systems are widely used to help manage hydrological extremes such as floods and droughts. The vast amounts of raw data that underpin forecast systems and the ability to generate information on forecast skill have, until now, not been publicly available. As part of the Global Flood Awareness System (...

Humanitarian disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan (SE Asia, 2013) and the Horn of Africa drought (2011–2012) are examples of natural hazards that were predicted, but where forecasts were not sufficiently acted upon, leading to considerable loss of life. These events, alongside international adoption of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction,...

Estimating how much water is flowing through rivers at the global scale is challenging due to a lack of observations in space and time. A way forward is to optimally combine the global network of earth system observations with advanced numerical weather prediction (NWP) models to generate consistent spatio-temporal maps of land, ocean, and atmosphe...

Riverine plastic pollution is of global concern due to its negative impact on ecosystem health and human livelihood. Recent studies show a strong link between river discharge and plastic transport, but the role of floods is still unresolved. We combined high resolution mismanaged plastic waste data and river flood extents with increasing return per...

IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes (IMPREX) was a European Union Horizon 2020 project that ran from September 2015 to September 2019. IMPREX aimed to improve society’s ability to anticipate and respond to future extreme hydrological events in Europe across a variety of uses in the water-related sectors (flood forecasting,...

Global and continental scale hydrological reanalysis datasets receive growing attention due to their increasing number of applications, ranging from water resources management, climate change studies, water related hazards and policy support. Until recently, their use was mostly limited to qualitative assessments, due to their coarse spatial and te...

Global hydrological forecasts are now produced operationally on a daily basis. However, the lack of global river discharge observations precludes routine flood forecast evaluation, an essential step in providing more skilful and reliable forecasts. A vision is expounded for greater and more timely exchange of global river discharge observations, wh...

Attribution of trends in streamflow is complex, but essential, in identifying optimal management options for water resources. Disagreement remains on the relative role of climate change and human factors, including water abstractions and land cover change, in driving change in annual streamflow. We construct a very dense network of gauging stations...

Hydrological models can provide estimates of streamflow pre- and post-observations, which enable greater understanding of past hydrological behaviour, and potential futures. In this paper, a new multi-objective calibration method was derived and tested for 303 catchments in the UK, and the calibrations were used to reconstruct river flows back to 1...

The open-source programming language R has gained a central place in the hydrological sciences over the last decade, driven by the availability of diverse hydro-meteorological data archives and the development of open-source computational tools. The growth of R's usage in hydrology is reflected in the number of newly published hydrological packages...

Globally, few precipitation records extend to the 18th century. The England Wales Precipitation (EWP) series is a notable exception with continuous monthly records from 1766. EWP has found widespread use across diverse fields of research including trend detection, evaluation of climate model simulations, as a proxy for mid‐latitude atmospheric circ...

Inferring the mechanisms causing river flooding is key to understanding past, present and future flood risks. However, a quantitative spatially distributed overview of the mechanisms that drive flooding across Europe is currently unavailable. In addition, studies that classify catchments according to their flood-driving mechanisms often identify a...

Early warning systems (EWS) for river flooding are strategic tools for effective disaster risk management in many world regions. When driven by ensemble Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP), flood EWS can provide skillful streamflow forecasts beyond the monthly time scale in large river basins. Yet, effective flood detection is challenged by accurat...

The open-source programming language R has gained a central place in the hydrological sciences over the last decade, driven by the availability of diverse hydro-meteorological data archives and the development of open-source computational tools. The growth of R's usage in hydrology is reflected in the number of newly published hydrological packages...

River flooding is a common hazard, causing billions of dollars in annual losses. Flood impacts are shaped by the spatial scale over which different rivers flood simultaneously, but this dimension of flood risk remains largely unknown. Using annual flood data from several thousand European rivers, we demonstrate that the flood synchrony scale—the di...

River flooding is a common hazard, causing billions of dollars in annual losses. Flood impacts are shaped by the spatial scale over which different rivers flood simultaneously, but this dimension of flood risk remains largely unknown. Using annual flood data from several thousand European rivers, we demonstrate that the flood synchrony scale – the...

In an increasing hydro-climatic risk context as a result of climate change, this work aims to identify future hydro-hazard hot-spots as a result of climate change across Great Britain. First, flood and drought hazards were defined and selected in a consistent and parallel approach with a threshold method. Then, a nation-wide systematic and robust s...

A thorough understanding of the recurrence intervals of peak river flows (typically annual maximum, AMAX, flows) is of crucial importance for designing engineering solutions that will effectively mitigate the negative consequences of flooding for people and the environment. However, flood risk assessments are typically based on an assumption of sta...

The uncertainties in scientific studies for climate risk management can be investigated at three levels of complexity: “ABC”. The most sophisticated involves “Analyzing” the full range of uncertainty with large multi-model ensemble experiments. The simplest is about “Bounding” the uncertainty by defining only the upper and lower limits of the likel...

Hydrological extremes, floods and droughts, cause significant economic damages and pose risks to lives worldwide. In an increasing hydro-climatic risk context as a result of climate change, this work identifies future hot-spots across Great Britain expected to be impacted by an increase in both floods and droughts. First, flood and drought hazards...

Observational trend analysis is fundamental for tracking emerging changes in river flows and placing extreme events in their longer-term historical context, particularly as climate change is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle. However, human disturbance within catchments can introduce artificial changes and confound any underlying climate...

A continuous 305-year (1711–2016) monthly rainfall series (IoI_1711) is created for the Island of Ireland. The post 1850 series draws on an existing quality assured rainfall network for Ireland, while pre-1850 values come from instrumental and documentary series compiled, but not published by the UK Met Office. The series is evaluated by comparison...

There is overwhelming evidence that the climate system has warmed since the instigation of instrumental meteorological observations. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the evidence for warming was unequivocal. However, owing to imperfect measurements and ubiquitous changes in measurement netw...

This paper describes the development of the first operational seasonal hydrological forecasting service for the UK, the Hydrological Outlook UK (HOUK). Since June 2013, this service has delivered monthly forecasts of streamflow and groundwater levels, with an emphasis on forecasting hydrological conditions over the next three months, accompanied by...

A continuous 305-year (1711–2016) monthly rainfall series is created for the Island of Ireland. Two overlapping data sources are employed: i) a previously unpublished UK Meteorological Office note containing annual rainfall anomalies and corresponding proportional monthly totals based on weather diaries and early observational records for the perio...

Fluvial floods are typically investigated as ‘events’ at the single basin-scale, hence flood management authorities may underestimate the threat of flooding across multiple basins driven by large-scale and nearly concurrent atmospheric event(s). We pilot a national-scale statistical analysis of the spatio-temporal characteristics of extreme mult...

Animation (.gif file) of river flow trends in the UK Benchmark Network V2 (UKBN2) from 1961-2014 (Harrigan et al., 2018, Hydrology Research).

The poster relates to the ERL article https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa868e and it has been presented at the NCAS Climate Modelling Summer School 2017 held at the University of Cambridge on September 2017.

A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric...

Skilful hydrological forecasts at sub-seasonal to seasonal lead times would be extremely beneficial for decision-making in water resources management, hydropower operations, and agriculture, especially during drought conditions. Ensemble streamflow prediction (ESP) is a well-established method for generating an ensemble of streamflow forecasts in t...

Sound water policy and management rests on sound hydrometeorological and ecological data. Conversely, unrepresentative, poorly collected, or erroneously archived data introduce uncertainty regarding the magnitude, rate, and direction of environmental change, in addition to undermining confidence in decision‐making processes. Unfortunately, data bia...

Our job as hydrologists is to understand and predict the water cycle. Historically, prediction of river flow has been at the centre of our attention. This is not surprising: rivers form a crucial resource, shape our environment , cause natural hazards, and are " easy " to observe. In future, study of river flow will obviously remain important. Howe...