The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) has launched a major new digital platform which will give researchers, government and industry access to the high-resolution water data needed to better understand, model and respond to floods and droughts across the UK.

For the first time in the UK, the Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure (FDRI) Digital Platform, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and delivered by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), brings together trusted hydrological data and analytical tools into a single source, including:

• Near real-time whole water cycle-data, covering the nationally representative catchments of the Upper Severn, Upper Tweed and Chess.
• Integrated high resolution hydrological monitoring data from across a range of organisations, such as the UK’s environmental agencies, to improve understanding of extremes.

As climate change drives more frequent and severe floods and droughts, demonstrated noticeably in the UK in the past few years, the need for better data to manage increasingly unpredictable extremes and ensure resilience in the future has risen. The Platform helps solve common data access and quality issues for researchers and other hydrological practitioners, enabling the insights decision makers need to manage water resources, protect infrastructure and build resilience in communities to help the UK grow sustainably in the future.

Created primarily for the hydrological research community, the platform will also support government bodies, regulators, water companies and environmental practitioners working to tackle the impacts of climate change and improve long-term water security.

FDRI digital lead, Matt Fry, from UKCEH, said:

“The launch of the digital platform is a significant step in providing accurate and timely water-cycle data to the research community, industry and government. At a time when climate change is increasing pressure on our water systems, better data, knowledge and models will hugely increase the UK’s resilience to future floods and droughts.

“This is just the beginning, and we’ll continue to develop the platform as we bring in more datasets from FDRI’s catchments and other organisations, while working closely with users to ensure it meets their needs for predicting, planning for and responding to floods and droughts."

Hayley Fowler FRS, Professor of Climate Change Impacts, Newcastle University, commented:

“High-quality hydrological data are fundamental to understanding and predicting floods and droughts, but accessing and bringing together the measurements we need can be a significant challenge. FDRI is making an important contribution by working with the hydrological community to make critical UK datasets more accessible, consistent and useful, while also providing new measurements across the whole water cycle.

“Its new digital platform will bring together high-resolution, quality-controlled datasets from across the UK with the latest measurements from FDRI’s research catchments. Making these observations more readily available will help researchers test and improve our models, address important evidence gaps and strengthen the science that underpins future flood and drought resilience across the UK.”

The FDRI Digital Platform will provide:

• One minute-resolution, whole water-cycle data from our own research catchments in the River Chess, Upper Severn and Upper Tweed.
• Comprehensive data from other sources to help analyse and model the hydrology of these study catchments, sourced from across the hydrological community, including water companies, regulators and researchers.
• UK-wide, high-resolution, quality-controlled datasets and derived data products covering a diverse range of hydrological variables, in particular rainfall, river level and flow, and abstractions, working with partner organisations.
• Tools for faster, more accurate analysis – interactive time series and spatial data viewers, with no coding experience needed, plus a github repository of open-source notebooks for faster data driven research.

Click here to access the FDRI Digital Platform

Click here to sign up for a webinar demonstration of the platform at 13:00 BST on 15 September 2026