Projects

Oasis Hub Ltd, brings together the World’s commercial and public environmental and risk information under one platform

Oasis Hub Ltd, brings together the World’s commercial and public environmental and risk information under one platform to enable society to be supplied with the data tools and services that can assist the understanding of Climate Risk and to plan for greater resilience against catastrophes. The platform has over 930 members representing a range of industries including (Re)insurance, finance, building & development, energy & infrastructure, consultancies and local authorities.

Flood hazard, as one of the most complex catastrophes, is modelled in multiple ways by both the commercial and academic modelling sectors. Because of the variation in modelling techniques, outputs from the models can result in significantly different estimates of properties affected by flooding. This is primarily due to (i) the different assumptions made in the various flood models, (ii) the input data used (i.e., type, quantity and resolution) and (iii) the modelling processes adopted. To this end disparity of modelled outputs is often questioned by insurers who base underwriting decisions using these models. Uncertainty criteria are often not communicated well, if at all. Climate change is also often not addressed within the majority of publicly available flood models.

Oasis HUB, in partnership with Cranfield University and the Building Resilience Into Risk Management (BRIM) Network, funded by ESPRC, will address the issue of classification by flood model comparisons based on data inputs, assumptions and methodologies used by the different model providers. However, many flood models are currently held within black box environments, in that high levels of competition by commercial flood model providers has sometimes led to a lack of openness around the criteria of different flood models. Academic organisations tend to provide more open information/ papers on the hazard models, but often prevent, via license, commercial companies from using their data, thus few industry standardised/peer reviewed, flood models exist.

We are conducting a study on flood model classification that will suggest minimum requirement for robust flood models for use by different sectors and for different purposes. Our aim is to ensure appropriate flood models are accessible, comparable and understandable by all those who need to use the data for flood risk assessment and adaptation/ resilience planning.

The main results will be published on completion of the study in a peer-reviewed journal and utilised to improve Oasis Hub services.  

If you are a model developer or end user of flood data we kindly ask you to participate in our research and complete our questionnaire, please click on the link below:

Access the questionnaire

 

(All data will be managed confidentially and anonymously)