The aim of SCIMAP-Flood is to help with the prioritisation of natural flood risk management or nature-based solutions within the catchment to increase their effectiveness. The tool identifies the origin of the water that contributes to the flood peaks within the catchment since mitigation actions in these locations will be more effective.
SCIMAP-Flood is part of the wider SCIMAP toolkit and hence follows the same theoretical approach based on the identification of critical source areas and the accumulation of probabilistic risks across the catchment. However, SCIMAP-Flood is the first SCIMAP toolbox component to handle the uncertainty in the inputs, specially in the range of rain storm maps and land cover information. The resulting maps therefore give information on the potential of a location for the implementation of a mitigation feature and on the confidence in that prediction. The detailed description of SCIMAP-Flood is available in this open access journal paper and there is an overview int he video below.
SCIMAP-Flood has been in development since a Defra competition in 2015 following Storm Desmond to look at new approach to catchment based flood hazard management. SCIMAP-Flood was part of the Durham University entry and won an Innovation Award for the approach. Since then, the approach has been tested and refined based on applications in the UK and Nepal.
The SCIMAP-Flood software is available as a command-line tool for both Windows and MacOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and there is a detailed document describing the required data pre-processing.
There will be an introduction to SCIMAP-Flood at the User Group Meeting 2022 in September. There will also be future detailed training events.