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The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

Groundwater-dominated catchments are often critical for nationally important water resources. Many conceptual rainfall–runoff models tend to degrade in their model performance in groundwater-dominated catchments, as they are rarely designed to simulate spatial groundwater behaviours or interactions with surface waters. Intercatchment groundwater flow is one such neglected variable. Efforts have been made to incorporate this process into existing models, but there is a need for improving our perceptual models of groundwater–surface water interactions prior to any model modifications. In this study, national meteorological, hydrological, hydrogeological, geological and artificial influence (characterising abstractions and return flows) datasets are used to infer a perceptual model of intercatchment groundwater flow (IGF) and how it varies across the river Thames, United Kingdom (UK). We characterise the water balance, presence of gaining/losing river reaches and intra-annual dynamics in 80 subcatchments of the river Thames, taking advantage of its wealth of data, densely gauged river network and geological variability. We show the prevalence of non-conservative river reaches across the study area, with heterogeneity both between, and within, geological units, giving rise to a complex distribution of recharge and discharge points along the river network. We infer where non-conservative reaches can be attributed to IGF and where other processes (e.g. surface water abstractions) are the likely cause. Through analysis of recorded reach length water balance data and hydrogeological perceptualisation, we conclude that outcrops of carbonate fractured aquifers (Chalk and Jurassic limestone) show evidence of IGF both from headwater to downstream reaches, and out-of-catchment via spring lines. We found variability across the study area, with more seasonality and variability in river catchments on Jurassic limestone outcrops compared to Chalk and Lower Greensand outcrops. Our re

The monthly summary of hydrological conditions in the United Kingdom is compiled as part of the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme (a joint UKCEH and BGS enterprise). The report features contemporary data for rainfall, river flow, reservoir and groundwater levels in the form of maps and graphs. A commentary is provided on the status of the nation’s water resources and any notable hydrological events during the month. The National River Flow and National Groundwater Level Archives help provide an historical context for these contemporary assessments. Financial support for the production of the Hydrological Summaries is provided by Defra, the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Rivers Agency in Northern Ireland and the Office of Water Services.

Drought forecasting and early warning systems for water resource extremes are increasingly important tools in water resource management in Europe where increased population density and climate change are expected to place greater pressures on water supply. In this context, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is often used to indicate future water resource behaviours (including droughts) over Europe, given its dominant control on winter rainfall totals in the North Atlantic region. Recent hydroclimate research has focused on the role of multiannual periodicities in the NAO in driving low frequency behaviours in some water resources, suggesting that notable improvements to lead-times in forecasting may be possible by incorporating these multiannual relationships. However, the importance of multiannual NAO periodicities for driving water resource behaviour, and the feasibility of this relationship for indicating future droughts, has yet to be assessed in the context of known non-stationarities that are internal to the NAO and its influence on European meteorological processes. Here we quantify the time–frequency relationship between the NAO and a large dataset of water resources records to identify key non-stationarities that have dominated multiannual behaviour of water resource extremes over recent decades. The most dominant of these is a 7.5-year periodicity in water resource extremes since approximately 1970 but which has been diminishing since 2005. Furthermore, we show that the non-stationary relationship between the NAO and European rainfall is clearly expressed at multiannual periodicities in the water resource records assessed. These multiannual behaviours are found to have modulated historical water resource anomalies to an extent that is comparable to the projected effects of a worst-case climate change scenario. Furthermore, there is limited systematic understanding in existing atmospheric research for non-stationarities in these periodic behaviours which

This report has been produced to summarise the results of the floods and droughts research infrastructure scoping study for the interested community.

Fractal analysis of a time series provides information on how the series varies across all (possible) temporal scales with respect to a given statistical measure. Dynamic hydrological models are typically optimized/calibrated using performance criteria defined in the time domain; however, the performance of models in simulating the fluctuation structure of a time series is seldom investigated. We use a multi-objective pattern search algorithm to calibrate a combined 15-minute resolution recharge–groundwater flow model. The non-dominated simulations of the model are then analysed in the fractal domain using robust detrended fluctuation analysis. The results show that some non-dominated simulations can be eliminated based on poor performance in the fractal domain, hence ensuring that the fluctuation structure of the optimized simulations is captured; this was named fractal-domain-refinement. Furthermore, some recharge parameters are sensitive to fractal-domain-refinement. This gives insights into which parameters are sensitive to the fractal behaviour of the simulated variable.