The Flood Forecasting Centre (FFC) is a joint venture between the Environment Agency and the Met Office to provide improved flood risk guidance for England and Wales. The FFC is based in the Operations Centre at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter and is jointly staffed from both organisations.
In the UK, meteorological and hydrological warnings are issued by different bodies. The Met Office operates the National Severe Weather Warning Service for the whole of the United Kingdom. Water and flood management responsibilities (including flood warning) are now devolved to each of the four home nations. This largely reflects the nature of UK catchments being typically small, compared to the weather systems that are the source of flooding, and a traditional reliance on live hydrometric measurements for public flood warnings rather than on flood forecasts provided by numerical weather prediction.
In England and Wales, the creation of the Environment Agency (initially covering both home nations until 2014) co-incided with a switch from a period noted for droughts to national flood events. The major national floods of Easter 1998 led to significant post event reviews identifying areas of improvement in terms of flood forecasting, monitoring and warnings Easter 1998 floods and Bye report. The Environment Agency's response included establishing a National Flood Warning Centre which operated between 1999 and 2003. This focussed on raising public awareness and improving flood forecasting and warning.
The Autumn 2000 Floods soon followed and post event reviews again identified deficiencies in flood forecasting and warning, notably in a reluctance to use the latest computer models to help understand and communicate flood risk [Autumn 2000 Review]]
Critically, both major reviews identified weaknesses in the flow of information between the Met Office and Environment Agency leading to this action in the Autumn 2000 Review: "The Agency and the Met Office will undertake a joint review of weather forecasting performance relative to flood forecasting need". In response a joint EA/Met Office technical workshop was held in May 2001 where the suggestion of a joint centre between the two organisations was first proposed by flood forecasting and warning practitioners at a working level. This ambition for closer working was underpinned by continual improvements in weather and flood forecasting. Numerical weather prediction had developed to a scale where rainfall forecasts were more reliably targeting catchments as global model scales reduced from 60km grids in 1998, to 40km in 2005 and 25km in 2010.[1] Flood Forecasting systems had also developed to be able to receive rainfall forecasts and drive real time hydrological forecasts for thousands of sites.
Following severe flooding across the UK in 2007 a further review was commissioned by the government to see what lessons could be learned. Chaired by Sir Michael Pitt the review produced a number of recommendations which were published in June 2008, among them was the recommendation that "The Environment Agency and the Met Office should work together, through a joint centre, to improve their technical capability to forecast, model and warn against all sources of flooding".
With these technical developments and political support, the parties commenced work on establishing the joint centre in 2008.
The FFC was officially opened on 21 April 2009 in London by Environment Minister Hilary Benn.[2] Its role is to provide better advice to governments, local authorities, emergency responders and the general public via its parent organisations. It faced its first major test in November 2009 when severe flooding affected Northern England, in particular Cumbria and the town of Cockermouth. The Pitt Review progress report highlighted the accuracy of the advice issued ahead of this event.[3] In April 2011 the FFC moved from central London to a permanent base within the Operations Centre at the Met Office HQ in Exeter.[3] It currently provides a range of operational Hydrometeorology services across England and Wales.
The FFC provides a range of services to a number of customer groups:
As well as delivering operational services the centre runs a continual improvement programme to review and improve its performance following flood events. Published papers, including contributions from FFC staff, describing some of this work are listed below.