Fathom’s Oliver Wing wins Allianz Climate Risk Research Award 2019
Four finalists out of dozens of entries were chosen to present their work to leading scientists and industry figures at Allianz HQ on the topic of research into climate-related risks.
Amidst tough competition, we were delighted that the panel of experts chose Oliver to be the overall winner in lieu of his world-leading research into the understanding of flood risk at large spatial scales.
Oliver has been working with us since 2016, when he began a Fathom-funded PhD under Paul Bates and Jeff Neal at the University of Bristol. In this time, he has led the publication of our critical research papers that constitute his PhD thesis. All of his work relates to Fathom-US, our award winning flood hazard model of the United States. In particular, Oliver’s work has involved: the most comprehensive validation of a large-scale flood model to date (Water Resources Research, 2017); updating flood risk estimates from those calculated when using deficient FEMA maps (Environmental Research Letters, 2018); the development of a US flood inundation forecasting framework (Journal of Hydrology X, 2019); and a levee detection algorithm to ensure necessary flood defence representation in large-scale models (Water Resources Research, 2019).
Allianz has published ten selected essays from the award, including Ollie’s, in a compendium on their website.
We are thrilled that the science and products pioneered by Fathom – and the tenacity and innovation displayed by one of our team – has been recognised in this way by Allianz. Ollie is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol, exploring the development of global CAT models.
Read the research
A New Automated Method for Improved Flood Defence Representation in Large‐Scale Hydraulic Models
Paper describing our new automated method of extracting levees from high resolution terrain models.
A flood inundation forecast of Hurricane Harvey
A paper describing our rapid flood forecasting model, tested against Hurricane Harvey.
Estimates of present and future flood risk in the conterminous United States
A collaboration with the US EPA and The Nature Conservancy to show that: a) previous estimates have significantly underestimated exposure of US population to flood risk; and b) that population and GDP growth are likely to cause this to further increase in future.
Validation of a 30m resolution flood hazard model of the conterminous United States
The first peer-reviewed validation of a continental-scale, high-resolution flood hazard model; this paper won the prestigious AGU Editors’ Choice Award in 2018.
