No score and three years ago the storm surge of December 5th 2013 swept along the East Coast of England, and the Humber Estuary. There was flooding in Grimsby and Hull, and the port at Immingham was also badly flooded. One of the worst affected areas of the village of South Ferriby on the South Bank of the Humber, a few miles away from my home town of Barton-upon-Humber.

Since the event, my colleagues and I have done a lot of research and work based on this event. This post will briefly highlight some of this, how you can find out out more, and what we have planned for the future.

At the time I was working on a project called Dynamic Humber helping to develop the CAESAR-Lisflood model. Although the original intention was to use the model to predict long-term geomorphic trends in the Estuary, basically how we can expect the mud and sediments to move and change over time, the storm surge changed the focus to flood risk.

We published our work on this in early 2015 – see the academic paper here.

The modelling technique was developed for other areas by my colleague Jorge Ramirez, and this research can be seen here.

This research led to us using our modelling to help the Environment Agency, and this work is ongoing still. We are also seeking to further the work of simulating the sediment processes within the Estuary,and understanding how this might influence future flood risk.

One of the enduring images of the event was the breach it punched in the spit-like feature at mouth, Spurn Point. For nearly two centuries Spurn has essentially been a man-made structure, and its origins, true nature, and hence its future, are largely a mystery. Read more on this here.

In Easter 2015, a PhD project was begun to try and model the future of Spurn Point, merging a model of the North Sea with our model of Humber.

Finally, SeriousGeoGames emerged as a direct consequence of this event and our modelling of it. The first application, Humber in a Box, shows a simplified version of our Humber model in an attractive, immersive, virtual reality environment. By raising the sea level we can see how flood risk in the Estuary is likely to change over time.

If you have a Cardboard-style headset, try the YouTube demo here.

I’m currently working with some talented students from SEED Software on the second iteration of Humber in a Box, called TideBox. We hope to make the application more ‘self-led’ and more generic about estuaries and tide, making more accessible.

There are likely to be lots of exciting developments in 2017 and I will bring you them as soon as I can.