Currently there is little/no flash flood forecasting available in Tasmania. This leads to poor situational awareness when state wide extreme weather events occur.

The outcomes of this project will lead to significant improvements in flash flooding forecast capability in Tasmania.

Some of the key outcomes of this research will be:

• Benchmarking of flash flood forecasting approaches currently in use around Australia against international best practice.
• An understanding of the effectiveness of BARRA to forecast events which are likely to cause flash floods.
• An understanding of the appropriateness of utilising BARRA forecasts in conjunction with downstream models (hydrologic and hydraulic) to inform communities of an imminent flood threat.
• Proof of concept flash flood forecasting system for a pilot study area.

The project will achieve the key outcomes by:

• looking at the best practice currently used to guide decision-making in issuing flood forecasts and when to release (or extract) water to minimise the probability of catastrophic floods
• using observed data to understand the nature of severe rainfall events that have occurred in Tasmania's historical record
• using high resolution climate model output to project how flooding is likely to change in the future under climate scenarios
• looking at how the lessons learnt through the Tasmanian investigation can be applied more broadly.