As Storm Babet brings challenging circumstances and significant negative impacts – including tragic loss of life – to the UK in mid-October, it’s an opportunity for teachers to do a bit of ‘live Geography’ and explore some impacts and approaches.

I thought it might help to bring together some helpful resources and ideas of what to do to bring the data and content alive in your classroom, beyond just collating images from the news!

Flood maps & risks:

Worth looking at the Environment Agency’s flooding website: https://check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk/. You can find local alerts, river functions, and even live hydrographs (https://check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk/river-and-sea-levels) which show the river responses to input. The precip is not measured, sadly…!

Some superb examples of GIS and mapping in action – the interactive flood maps, are genuinely really valuable.

River webcams:

This incredible tweet from @MetWatchUK showed visibly how live webcam data for rivers is an amazing tool, and they linked to Farson Digital Watercams which collates a number of sites across the UK. If you’ve got one near you, they have archives and recorded images over a time period.

Met data:

As ever, earth.nullschool.net is my go to for mapping the causes – Babet showed some classic frontal features and swirls which are interesting to explore (quick user guide, including how to go back in time is here). The Met Office’s rainfall radar layers are slightly higher-resolution and based on radar of what fell (rather than cloud precipitable water or theoretical precip), but they are slightly less archivable and explorable after the fact. Good if you can capture and see what’s going on live.

There are lots of people involved in management and thinking – one of the best is Midlands-based Dave Throup – but I’d recommend exploring Environment Agency staff near you to see what’s being communicated and shared!

Hope you’re all safe, dry and your schools and students are exploring this from a theoretical standpoint only!