Usability of tools - UKFE case study

Descriptions

The Environment Agency (EA) established the Flood Hydrology Improvement Programme (FHIP) to deliver the priority needs of the roadmap that align with EA needs. FHIP Project EAM7 "New methods in operational flood hydrology" is currently in the discovery phase of its programme which is being delivered as a series of work packages. To resolve limitations of existing standard methods, we need to improve the accessibility and usability of alternative methods to allow these to be easily and affordably applied in operational flood risk modelling studies. The discovery phase of EAM7 is exploring topics such as user needs, barriers to adopting new methods, international best practice, uncertainty, and climate change, to inform decisions on what alternative method will be developed as the proof of concept and how it can be brought into operational use. The aim of this project is to explore how to overcome some of the blockers identified as barriers to adoption: - Methods must have affordable maintained software that is within existing skillsets. - Methods must be supported by guidance documents covering usage and parameters. - Methods must be supported by affordable and accessible training. - Methods must be well communicated, openly endorsed and accepted by legislative authorities. - Methods must be comparable in time and costs to existing methods. - Methods must use readily available, accessible and preferably open data sources. - Methods must have funding for ongoing maintenance, support and updates. The case study chosen for this work package is the UKFE R package. UKFE provides functions to implement the methods of the Flood Estimation Handbook (FEH) and its associated updates, as well as offering additional hydrological functions. The package was developed and is maintained by Anthony Hammond on a personal basis. It is freely available for use under the GPL-3 license from the CRAN repository of R packages. An alphabetical guide to the functions is available with the package, and a quick guide to implementing the FEH methods is available online at UKFE: FEH Quick Guide - FloodHydroStats.