Lucy Barker

• Identifying and characteristing droughts
• Improving drought monitoring and early warning
• Collation and use of drought impact data to improve drought monitoring and impact forecasting
• Hydrological situation monitoring and reporting
• Visualisation of monitoring information to improve communication

Lucy is specialised in drought research in the UK and internationally. She works to advance hydrological drought characterisation and improve the implementation of drought indicators for monitoring and early warning applications on projects in the UK, Europe, China, India and Thailand. Lucy led the development of guidance for countries to monitor their progress towards UNCCD Strategic Objective 3, tracking trends in drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability over time with the aim of enhancing the resilience of vulnerable populations and ecosystems to drought. In the DrIVER project, she explored the use standardised drought indices in the UK and contributed to research linking indices to impacts in order to ground truth the indices used for monitoring and early warning. Within the Historic Droughts project she used identified, characterised and ranked drought events for 108 catchments across the UK between 1891 and 2015. Using these data she developed the ‘UK Hydrological Drought Explorer’ an interactive web app using the R programming language to enable users to explore the analysis in more detail. She also leads the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme, authoring the monthly Hydrological Summary for the UK and occasional reporting of extreme events for an audience that encompasses the government, media and general public. Within ENDOWS, she contributed to the development of the UK Water Resources Portal, including engagement and co-design with a range of stakeholders. She is working with the World Meteorological Organization on the implementation and coordination of the Hydrological Status and Outlook (HydroSOS) initiative. Lucy’s work aims to better inform decision-makers, improve resilience and reduce vulnerability to hydrological hazards.

2017-present: Hydrological Analyst, UKCEH

• 2023 - present: Lead and Researcher; National Monitoring Programme (NHMP); UK-SCAPE, NERC National Capability.

• 2022 - present: Project and Task Lead (Global Adaptation), International Science for Net Zero Plus; NERC National Capability.

• 2022 - present: Work Package Co-Lead (Knowledge Integration and Exchange); Researcher, Climate change in the Arctic-North Atlantic Region and Impacts on the UK (CANARI); NERC National Capability. 

• 2022 - present: Coordination team and Technical team member, HydroSOS Implementation Phase; World Meteorological Organization.

• 2021-present: Work package lead (Analysis) & Researcher, Reference Observatory of Basins for INternational hydrological climate change detection (ROBIN); NERC.

• 2021-2022: Task lead (Global drought risk), Land Air Water International Science (LAWIS); NERC.

• 2020-2021: Project lead, Good Practice Guidance for National Reporting on UNCCD Strategic Objective 3; UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

• 2020-2021: Researcher, Reviewing Approaches for communicating Drought status And Risk (RADAR); Defra.

• 2020-2021: Module lead (Introduction to Droughts), Ayeyarwady Integrated River Basin Management Project (AIRBM): Myanmar WMO Hydrology Training Programme; World Meteorological Organization.

• 2018 - 2022: Researcher, Strengthening Thailand’s Agricultural Drought Resilience (STAR); Newton Fund/NERC.

• 2018 - 2020: Work Package Co-Lead (WP2b Hydrological Status Monitoring), HydroSOS Pilot Phase; World Meteorological Organization.

• 2017 - 2021: Researcher, Sustainable Use of Natural Resources to Improve Human Health and Support Economic Development (SUNRISE); NERC.

• 2017-2019: Researcher, Engaging diverse stakeholders and publics with outputs from the Drought and Water Scarcity Programme (ENDOWS); NERC.

• 2015 - present: Author of Hydrological Summary for the UK, National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (NHMP); UK-SCAPE, NERC National Capability.

• 2014 - 2023: Researcher, National Monitoring Programme (NHMP); UK-SCAPE, NERC National Capability.

2014-2017: Drought Monitoring and Water Resources Research Associate, CEH

• 2015-2017: Researcher, End-to-end Demonstrator for improved decision making in the water sector in Europe (EDgE); ECMWF/Copernicus C3S.

• 2014-2019: Researcher, Analysis of Historic Droughts and Water Scarcity; NERC.

• 2014 - 2017: Researcher, Drought Impacts: Vulnerability thresholds in monitoring and Early-warning Research (DrIVER); Belmont Forum/NERC.

• 2014-2019: Regional Representative for Yorkshire and the North East of England, National River Flow Archive (NRFA), UK-SCAPE, NERC National Capability.

2012-2014: Technical Analyst, JBA Consulting

Before joining UKCEH, Lucy worked at JBA Consulting for 18 months in GIS and hydrology teams mainly working on flood mapping and culvert blockage risk mapping as well as on the Global Flood Map for JBA Risk Management.