This page contains the outputs of a project funded by Subak to compile historic data on the impacts of recent urban flash flood events in England using information contained in newspaper reports. It aims to map these events in as much detail as possible, looking for information at street and building level.

The project uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to detect urban flash flood events from newspaper articles, and extract the names of streets, buildings and other places affected.

The project analysed approximately 17,400 articles about flooding from around 300 newspaper websites, generating a list of 56 of the most significant dates for summertime urban flash flooding in England since 2010.

Each map presents short, standardised information on what can be understood to have occurred at each location from articles. This may include depth information, whether internal flooding occurred, etc.

The project outputs are as follows:

• A set of 56 downloadable interactive maps of flooding impacts on each of the key dates identified (see below)

• A geoJSON file containing the data for each map

• A single geoJSON file containing the data for all maps

• A csv file providing details of each date, as well as other dates on which urban flash floods were identified as having occurred but which were not mapped due to a lack of geographical detail. Urls to relevant articles are provided for all dates, including those which haven't been mapped.

The entire set of outputs can be downloaded here, otherwise refer to the list below for individual events.

Coordinates for most of the locations in the maps and geoJSON files have been derived from OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap data is available under an Open Data Commons Open Database License. Consequently, Urban Flash Flooding in England project data is also available under the same conditions. You are free to use or adapt this data however you wish as long as you:

• Give appropriate credit to both ClimateNode and OpenStreetMap
• Distribute any altered or extended data only under the same licence

Please refer to OpenStreetMap's licensing conditions via the above link for full details.

Documentation is here. Please direct any queries about the project to contact@climatenode.org.

The criteria for whether a map has been generated for a particular date are:

• it falls between May and September (inclusive)
• flash flooding due to heavy rainfall occurred in at least one town or city which can be mapped in detail (although towns/cities for which there is less detail, as well as rural areas, are also presented)

The focus of the project is on surface water flooding, although some events also involve fluvial flooding, and/or in some locations the type of flooding may not be clear.

The methodology uses only articles which are currently online. There are likely many relevant articles since 2010 which are no longer available online, e.g. because a newspaper has been taken over, and unfortunately it has not been possible to include this information. The volume of relevant articles with sufficient detail available online declines significantly prior to around the middle of the last decade. Users are referred to the British Chronology of Flash Floods for further sources of information.

Each piece of information presented in a marker popup has a hyperlink or hyperlinks to its source(s).

IMPORTANT: treat marker coordinates with caution. Popups present information linked to the geographical entity or approximate location mentioned in the header, not necessarily the coordinates of the marker. The exceptions to this are:

• Two asterisks ** indicates ‘true coordinates’: references to junctions, buildings etc., or images, have been used to identify where the flooding occurred fairly precisely
• One asterisk * indicates ‘approximate coordinates’: information in the article has allowed an approximate location to be identified, for example a section of a street between two reference points

Map dates reflect the date of the event, not the publication date of articles. When attributing flooding impacts to a date, the intention is to attribute the impact to the rainfall which occurred on that date. For example, if a flood impact is discovered on a Monday but due to rainfall which happened on Sunday evening, the impact is placed on the map for the Sunday. Where this is ambiguous because of overnight rainfall, this is indicated via a quality flag.

Quality flags, such as whether there is some uncertainty over the date or location of the impact, are presented between square brackets [].

Some articles describe more than one event. Every effort has been made to ensure information included on each map is relevant to the given date.

In some articles, users may need to click through a photo gallery or watch a video to find a reference to the place mentioned.