Hydrologists are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the UK’s official record of river flow data.
The National River Flow Archive (NRFA), based at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), holds and provides access to current and historic data on daily, monthly and flood peak data from 1,600 gauging stations. Many records go back to the 1960s and some to the 19th century.
The data are used in many ways, for example, to assess the availability of water across the UK and to make predictions about floods and droughts in the coming weeks and decades, thereby informing action by water companies and government agencies.
Records also underpin hydrological research, assessing the impacts of climate change on river flows over time and to assess flood and drought events in relation to other similar events in the past.
The UK’s gauging stations are operated by the Environment Agency in England, Natural Resources Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure - Rivers. NRFA has handled over 2 million enquiries and data requests on behalf of these four UK Measuring Authorities since 2007, while since 2016 there have been more than 5.7 million recorded page views on its website.
Jamie Hannaford, Principal Hydrologist at UKCEH, says: “Thanks to our partnership with the four measuring agencies, the archive has a vast range of records from hundreds of rivers, covering the length and breadth of the UK and different types of catchments. The comprehensive NRFA data underpin much of the hydrological research and water resources development and management activity in the UK.”
Mr Hannaford was one the speakers at a webinar on Thursday 12 October, organised by the British Hydrological Society to celebrate 40 years of the NRFA.
Katie Muchan and Rob Grew of the Environment Agency and Penny Hearn of the Canal & River Trust spoke about the importance of hydrometric data.
Anthony Hammond of JBA Consulting highlighted the benefits of freely available data to scientific research, citing examples of the use of NRFA data, in particular the peak flows dataset in the flood risk management industry.
Saskia Salwey, a PhD student at the University of Bristol, explained how she uses the NRFA data to validate and calibrate models to try to understand how the reservoirs are operated and what impact they are having on river flows downstream.
Dr Louise Slater, Associate Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Oxford, presented a selection of projects developed by her research group using NRFA data. These projects include estimations of historical changes in the occurrence of severe river flooding as well as future flood predictions for Great Britain.
You can search for gauging stations’ data via an interactive map on the NRFA website.