Dr. Ted McCormack:

As Dr. Naughton said, our primary focus is on data collection and identifying the lack of historic data in turloughs as opposed to rivers and coastal flooding and to improve the understanding of groundwater flow systems as a result of the new data. The project is a collaboration between Geological Survey Ireland and Trinity College Dublin.

One of the primary things we did early on was set out our monitoring network. We have 60 monitoring stations in various flood-prone turloughs around the country. These sites were chosen primarily if they were brought to our attention by a local authority or the OPW. I should have said that 20 of these sites will be upgraded to telemetric status so they can be accessed online. It is a work in progress. Aside from those 60 stations, there are about 400 turloughs in Ireland. We cannot put physical monitoring in all of them so we came up with a strategy for monitoring the turloughs that we do not have equipment at. These ungauged catchments are important if we want to implement the second cycle of the EU Floods Directive. To create our groundwater flood map of Ireland, we need the data from all these sites, both current data and historic data. This is accessible by the Sentinel-1 satellite as part of the European Space Agency programme. It offers good spatial coverage. It is an all-weather day and night system. It is systematic data collection so we get an image over Ireland four days out of every six. It is good resolution which is useful for turloughs. These satellites were operational during the 2015-2016 floods so we have good images of the worst flooding that occurred.

I will show members an example of normal aerial imagery of Ballycar. I will hopefully move to a video that works. I will show the committee what Ballycar looks like during a summer from a synthetic-aperture radar image. It is pretty blurry and that is due to the nature of the radar but it is still useful. The video shows the 2015 floods as well as the most recent floods, both of which closed the railway line. The ultimate output of the timed series of satellite images combined with topographic mapping is to pull out elevations of the flood in the image. This image is our synthetic hydrograph of Ballycar flooding. It is preliminary. We are still working on it so the numbers are not perfect. It gives us a good idea of how bad the floods were in 2015 and more recently.

The reason we are collecting this data for everywhere is that we can apply hydrological models to them to start building long-term hydrological data. If we have three years of synthetic satellite generated hydrographs, we can apply models to them using rainfall. For as long as there is a rainfall record, we can go back and estimate 70 years of flooding in the turlough and how it operated and that gives us a grip on coming up with a one-in-100-year flood at the turlough. That is useful for flood risk, climate change and conservation objectives.