Research Overview

Research Overview

Barry has specialised in whole-catchment risk and resilience, with over 23 years’ experience of research and practice. He led the joint JBA-LEC team that won the Defra Flood Modelling prize, building on our joint Rivers Trust Life-IP project modelling and mapping of strategic opportunities and benefits for Natural Flood Management (NFM) in Cumbria. This used spatial joint probability of extremes approaches developed Lancaster, to drive a whole-catchment JFlow model and test the resilience of many distributed nature-based measures against different spatially realistic extremes. He developed the data-mining approaches behind the Potential Areas for Working With Natural Processes, which form part of the EA WWNP Evidence Directory.

Barry has also developed whole catchment diffuse pollution models, whilst accounting for uncertainty using the GLUE approaches developed at LEC, and also to build modelling strategies behind a new Natural Capital Assessment of the Petteril catchment, Cumbria. In 2018 Barry has been working with SMHI Sweden to produce a new national unsteady rainfall, runoff and water quality model of England for the Environment Agency using an adapted version of HYPE.

He has also worked with the Ensemble group at Lancaster, and Natural England, to develop and test new techniques for Engagement with farmers and landowners on where nature-based flood risk reduction measures could be placed, and then modelling the impacts of these in front of them. This is helping to incorporate other types of data into modelling, and helps de-mystify the modelling process.

Published Research

Barry has published a number of high-profile peer-reviewed FCERM research reports alongside peer-reviewed journal papers spanning areas of hydrology, hydraulics, environmental risks and catchment modelling.

Current Research

NERC funded Q-NFM project, “Quantifying the likely magnitude of nature-based flood mitigation effects across large catchments”. NERC Grant NE/R004722/1, PI Nick Chappell.

Roles

Barry is a visiting researcher at LEC, seconded in part-time from JBA Consulting, where he has been Head of Environmental Modelling for 8 years.

Teaching

NERC funded Advanced Training Short Course on NFM. JBA Training courses.

Outside Interests

Trekking with his family, cycling and the outdoors.

Related Content

Barry has also helped develop JBA’s Flood Foresight, a real-time and forecast flood footprint technology to make use of JBA’s very large scenario library of flood maps