Tim Fewtrell

BSc (Bristol), MSc (London), PhD (Bristol)

Willis Research Fellow

Contact
office: 1.7N
tel: +44 (0)117 92 88290
fax: +44 (0)117 928 7878
e-mail: t.fewtrell@bristol.ac.uk

Research interests

Flood hydrology and hydraulics, flood inundation modelling, regional flood risk analysis, urban hydrology

Postdoctoral position

Willis Research Fellow as part of the Willis Research Network (Jan 2008 - Dec 2010)

PhD research

The aim of the research is to develop a simple two-dimensional numerical model in order to adequately represent the flooding process in an urban area. The PhD is extending LISFLOOD-FP, a raster-based model representing flow on the floodplain as a series of storage cells which has been shown to represent flooding effectively in a rural environment. The initial work on this project is focusing on methods of dealing with sub-grid scale urban media that act to obstruct the flow and reduce the area available for water storage. Future work may include the incorporation of a sewer network model for cases where the urban drainage system contributes greatly to the flood waters. Currently, the case studies for this work are the Carlisle flooding of January 2005 and the benchmarking study for flood inundation of the Thames Embayments. This project is funded by NERC as a CASE Partnership with Halcrow who are providing access to the ISIS and TUFLOW modelling packages in order to support this research.

Complex interaction between flow and the urban environment - Click to enlarge Flooding in Carlisle city centre, January 2005 - Click to enlarge Using dGPS to map the flood extents in Carlisle - Click to enlarge
(a) (b) (c)

Photos: a) Complex interactions between flow and the urban environment, b) Flooding in Carlisle city centre, January 2005, c) Using dGPS system to map the flood extents in Carlisle.

In order to obtain the data necessary for the Carlisle Study, a NERC Urgency Grant was awarded to Dr. Matt Horritt for a field study of the flood extents. Consequently, in January 2005, a team from Bristol went up to Carlisle and used a dGPS system (provided by NERC Equipment Pool, Edinburgh) to map the trash lines and flood marks throughout the worst affected areas of the city. These results will be combined with a similar survey conducted by the EA Penrith in order to act as model validation data.

PhD Supervisors:
Prof. Paul Bates, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr. Matt Horritt, Department of Engineering, University of Bristol
Dr. Jon Wicks, Associate Director, Halcrow

Sample Publications

Journal Articles:

Neal, J.C., Bates, P.D., Fewtrell, T.J., Hunter, N.M., Wilson, M.D. and Horritt, M.S. (2009) Distributed whole city water level measurements from the Carlisle 2005 urban flood event and comparison with hydraulic model simulations. Journal of Hydrology, 368 (1-4), 42-55.

Neal, J.C., Fewtrell, T.J. and Trigg, M.A. (2009) Parallelisation of storage cell flood models using OpenMP. Environmental Modelling & Software, 24, 872-877.

Fewtrell, T.J., Bates, P.D., Horritt, M.S. & Hunter, M.N. (2008) Evaluating the effect of scale in flood inundation modelling in urban environments, Hydrological Processes, 22, pp. 5107-5118

Conference Proceedings:

Fewtrell, T.J., Di Baldassarre, G., Neal, J.C., Matgen, P. and Schumann, G.J-P. (2009) Evaluating models of varying complexity with uncertain water levels from space-borne imagery. EGU General Assembly 2009 abstract. (Poster)

Fewtrell, T.J., Bates P.D., Neal, J.C. and Trigg, M.A. (2009) Improving flood inundation models of urban flood risk using a porosity-type approach: a case study from Carlisle 2005. EGU General Assembly 2009 abstract. (Poster)

Fewtrell, T.J., Bates, P.D., de Wit, A., Asselman, N. & Sayers, P. (2009) 'Comparison of varying complexity numerical models for the prediction of flood inundation in Greenwich, UK', FLOODrisk2008, Keble College, Oxford, Flood Risk Management: Research and Practice, 1, pp. 95-104.

Fewtrell, T.J., Bates, P.D., Horritt, M.S. & Trigg, M.A. (2007) The effect of temporal and spatial coarsening on storage cell predictions of urban flood inundation, 32nd Congress of the International Association for Hydraulic Engineering and Research, Venice, Italy, pp. 37-37.

Conference Contributions:

Neal, J.C., Schumann, G., Fewtrell, T.J., Budimir, M., Bates, P. and Mason, D. (2010) Evaluating a new LISFLOOD-FP formulation with the summer 2007 floods in Tewkesbury UK. IAHR 1st European congress 4th - 6th May 2010, Edinburgh, UK.

Neal, J.C., Fewtrell, T.J., Trigg, M.A. and Bates P.D. (2009) Parallelisation of storage cell flood models using OpenMP, MPI and accelerator cards. EGU General Assembly 2009 abstract. (Presentation)

Schumann, G.J-P., Mason, D., Di Baldassarre, G., Fewtrell, T.J., Neal, JC and Bates PD (2009) A comprehensive space-borne SAR dataset to investigate flood processes: a case study of the England 2007 summer flood. EGU General Assembly 2009 abstract. (Poster)

Asselman, N., Maat, J. ter., de Wit, A, Verhoeven, G, Soares-Frazao, S., Velickovic, M., Goutiere, L., Zech, Y., Fewtrell, T.J. & Bates, P.D. (2009) 'Flood inundation modelling: model choice and application', FLOODrisk2008, Keble College, Oxford, Flood Risk Management: Research and Practice, pp. 211-219.

Neal, J.C., Bates, P.D., Fewtrell, T.J., Wright, N.G., Villanueva, I., Hunter, .N.M & Horritt, M.S. (2009) 'Modelling the 2005 Carlisle flood event using LISFLOOD-FP and TRENT', FLOODrisk2008, Keble College, Oxford, Flood Risk Management: Research and Practice, pp. 263-272.

Links

Willis Research Network
Willis Re
Halcrow Group
Natural Environment Research Council
ISIS Modelling System
TUFLOW Modelling System