Suchergebnisse

The risk of surface water flooding (SWF) in England is already high and its frequency and severity is projected to increase in the future. SWF generally occurs due to intense, highly localised rainfall, which is challenging to forecast with sufficient accuracy to take proactive action ahead of flood events. Being able to manage the risk effectively lies in improved rainfall and flood forecast products, better communication of uncertainty and building the capacity of local responders. This study utilises state-of-the-art high-resolution ensemble rainfall forecasts and hydraulic modelling tools alongside a novel post-processing method to develop and trial new SWF forecast products within an incident workshop attended by forecast producers and regional forecast users. Twenty-two of 24 workshop participants reported that the new information would be useful to their organisation but more product development and training in its interpretation is required. Specific recommendations to improve SWF forecast provision include increased support for local government through a single government organisation responsible for SWF, making more use of existing static SWF mapping in a real-time context and employing the process of user-based consultation, as outlined in this study, to guide the future development of future SWF forecast information and processes.

8 páginas, 4 figuras, 2 tablas. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. ; In wildlife disease management there are few diseases for which vaccination is a viable option. The human vaccine BCG has been used for the control of bovine tuberculosis in badgers since 2010 and is expected to increase. Understanding the long-term effects of repeated vaccination campaigns on disease prevalence is vital, but modelling thus far has generally assumed that a vaccine provides perfect protection to a proportion of the population, and that animals exposed to a repeated vaccination have a second independent chance of becoming protected. We held a workshop with experts in the field to obtain consensus over the main pathways for partial protection in the badger, and then simulated these using an established model. The available data supported the possibility that some individuals receive no benefit from the BCG vaccine, others may result in a delayed disease progression and in the remaining animals, vaccine protected the individual from any onward transmission. Simulating these pathways using different levels of overall efficacy demonstrated that partial protection leads to a reduced effect of vaccination, but in all of the identified scenarios it was still possible to eradicate disease in an isolated population with no disease introduction. We also identify those potential vaccination failures that require further investigation to determine which of our proposed pathways is the more likely. ; This work was funded by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs(Defra), UK [project SE3325]. ; Peer reviewed