Overview
The team of Qiuhua Liang (Loughborough University, UK)
Liang and his team have developed an open-sourced flood model, the High-Performance Integrated Modelling System (HiPIMS), a pioneering multi-GPU hydrodynamic model for real-time flood forecasting. It simulates the processes of rainfall-runoff, overland flow, river hydraulics and flood wave propagation across a large catchment or a city at a high temporal-spatial resolution. It has become widely recognised and is used by many academic, government and industrial stakeholders.
Team members include: Huili Chen (Loughborough University), Xiaodong Ming (Ping An P&C Insurance Company of China), Xilin Xia (University of Birmingham, UK), Yan Xiong (Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing, China) and Jiaheng Zhao (FM Global, Singapore)
Winner Profile
Qiuhua Liang
Qiuhua Liang is Chair Professor of Water Engineering and the founding director of the International Centre for Informatics and Disaster Resilience (ICIDR) at Loughborough University, as well as being an elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) and the chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Informatics and Multi-hazard Risk Reduction (IMRR).
Education:
• 2005 – PhD; University of Oxford (Computational Hydraulics)
• 1997 – BEng; Dalian University of Technology, China (Civil Engineering)
Selected Awards:
2024 – Elected Fellow, Royal Academy of Engineering
2018 – Outstanding Paper Award, Journal of Flood Risk Management
Huili Chen
Huili Chen is a senior lecturer of Water Engineering at Loughborough University and assistant holder of the UNESCO Chair in Informatics and Multi-hazard Risk Reduction.
Education:
• 2016 – PhD; Peking University, China (Physical Geography)
• 2012 – MSc; Wuhan University, China (Land Resource Management)
• 2010 – BEng; Wuhan University, China (Land Resource Management)
Xiaodong Ming
Xiaodong Ming is a Senior Analyst of Natural Disaster Risk at Ping An P&C Insurance of China, specializing in flood risk management. As the principal flood expert, he leads the development of Ping An's EagleX Digital Risk System, enhancing disaster risk assessment and mitigation strategies to support risk reduction services.
Education:
• 2018 – PhD; Newcastle University, UK (Water Resources)
• 2014 – MSc; Beijing Normal University, China (Natural Disasters)
• 2011 – BSc; Hubei University, China (Geographical Sciences)
Xilin Xia
Xilin Xia is an Assistant Professor in Resilience Engineering at the University of Birmingham and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.
Education:
• 2017 – PhD; Newcastle University, UK (Water Resources)
• 2012 – Master of Engineering; Wuhan University, China (Road and Railway Engineering)
• 2010 – Bachelor of Engineering; Wuhan University, China (Civil Engineering)
Yan Xiong
Yan Xiong is a lecturer at Jiangsu Open University, and previously completed postdoctoral research in coastal engineering at Hohai University.
Education:
• 2014-2019 – PhD; Hohai University, China (Port, Coastal and Offshore Engineering)
• 2016-2017 – Joint PhD; Newcastle University, UK (CSC-funded program)
• 2010-2014 – BEng; Hohai University, China (Port, Waterway and Coastal Engineering)
Acceptance Speech
Honourable Secretary-General, Your Royal Highness, honoured colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: I am deeply honoured to be awarded the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in the Surface Water category. This recognition means so much to me and my team, as it underscores the importance of our continuous efforts in developing pioneering, open-source, high-performance hydrodynamic models to support real-time flood forecasting and broader disaster risk reduction.
Disasters induced by natural hazards, such as flooding, affect millions of people each year, causing economic losses of hundreds of billions of dollars. Death tolls and economic impacts (in terms of percentage of national GDP) from these disasters are greatest in low-to-middle income countries. Research have shown that disasters linked to natural hazards are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, due to the impacts of climate change and ever more complex human-landscape interactions, e.g. rapid urbanisation. The world urgently needs effective disaster risk reduction strategies and adaptation solutions to ensure resilient infrastructure and sustainable socio-economic development. Disaster risk reduction is central to the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and incorporated in the SDG framework.
Digital technologies have reshaped our world. Globally, we are now more connected than ever before. Beyond changing our daily lives, recent advances in digital informatics, including high-performance computing, AI, big data analytics, digital twins, provide unprecedented opportunities to advance disaster risk reduction research and practice. For over a decade, my team and I have been developing methodologies and tools to leverage emerging digital informatics technologies for modelling and assessing the risk of flooding and other natural hazards.
Our High-Performance Integrated hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS) exemplifies these efforts. First released in 2013, HiPIMS has achieved real-time prediction of the entire flooding process, from rainfall-runoff to inundation, using a full hydrodynamic model at an unprecedented 1~5m resolution over catchments or cities spanning 1000s of km2. This was impossible in the past due to the prohibited computational cost associated with this type of models. Now, HiPIMS has been widely recognised and applied to flood forecasting and risk assessments in many countries across the world, empowering decision-makers and communities to mitigate the devastating impacts of floods and contributing to global disaster risk reduction.
Again, this award is a tremendous recognition of our sustained work in this field. I am deeply grateful to the jury and prize organising committee for selecting us for this honour and for inviting me to this prestigious event. I hope our research can inspire further scientific innovation in developing technologies and tools for global disaster risk reduction, addressing one of the world’s most pressing challenges, which is central to UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda.
This achievement would not have been possible without the support and dedication of my past and present team members and collaborators. I would also like to extend my deepest thanks to my wife, Ning, my sons, Andrew and Craig, and my wider family for their unwavering love and support throughout the years.
Thank you.
Winning Work
[1] High-Performance Integrated hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS), GPLv3 licensed flood model open-sourced at GitHub (https://github.com/HEMLab/HiPIMS-CUDA) in 2020.
[2] Xia X, Liang Q, Ming X (2019) A full-scale fluvial flood modelling framework based on a high-performance integrated hydrodynamic modelling system (HiPIMS). Adv Water Resour, 132: 103392.
[3] Ming X, Liang Q, Xia X, Li D, Fowler HJ (2020) Real-time flood forecasting based on a high-performance 2D hydrodynamic model and numerical weather predictions. Water Resour Res, 56: e2019WR025583.
[4] Xiong Y, Liang Q, Zheng J, Stolle J, Nistor I, Wang G (2022) A fully coupled hydrodynamic-DEM model for simulating debris dynamics and impact forces. Ocean Eng, 225: 111468.
[5] Chen H, Zhao J, Liang Q, Maharjan SB, Joshi SP (2022) Assessing the potential impact of glacial lake outburst floods on individual objects using a high-performance hydrodynamic model and open-source data. Sci Total Environ, 806(3): 151289.