Objectives

This Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Urgency Grant had three specific aims:

1. To establish the deep water sedimentary event signature for lakes with differing water retention times (21-350 days) and to use repeat sampling into the summer period of peak organic productivity in the lake to test the evolution of this and high magnitude events in the recent past (11/2009) into the palaeoflood record.

2. To establish and monitor how post-flood conditioning of catchment-to-lake and within-lake processes modifies or augments the lake sediment flood signal for 2015 event.

3. To improve confidence in our existing palaeoflood series by placing this recent extreme event in that longer term context, and to establish flood frequency models that use integrated sediment and river flow data.

The project used the unique opportunity afforded by contrasting pre- and post-flood sedimentary records and fluxes to establish the sedimentary signature of one of NW England's most extreme floods; crucially to engender confidence in the use of our lake sediment records as genuine flood series, thus contributing to calls for enhanced flood records to accurately define flood risk in these and potentially wider UK and world river systems.