Kathryn Roscoe
Dr. Kathryn Roscoe has 15 years’ experience in flood risk management and hydrology. She obtained her MSc in Hydrology at University of California, Davis, and her PhD in probabilistic modeling of levee systems from the Hydraulic Engineering department at Delft University of Technology. At Deltares, she specializes in probabilistic risk analysis, the reliability of flood defense systems, flood damage modeling for vulnerability and risk assessments, and adaptive planning of flood protection systems to changes in climate, policy, and socio-economic development. She has extensive programming experience, and provides quantitative solutions to typically qualitative analyses. She has worked extensively on the development of models and tools for the risk-based assessment of levees, dunes, and hydraulic structures in the Netherlands, and was involved in numerous contributing research projects. Her research has focused on the use of Bayesian Networks to augment more traditional methods of reliability analysis, particularly the ability to utilize and incorporate the experience and observations of experts and stakeholders in the calculation of flooding probabilities.
Her current work focuses on: (1) supporting flood risk management with the dynamic adaptive policy pathways (DAPP) approach, (2) development and improvement of probabilistic methods for risk assessment, and (3) asset management of flood defenses, in which adaptive and risk-based strategies are developed for optimal investment and stakeholder consensus. She was recently involved in the development of adaptation pathways for managing flood risk in the Little River Canal basin in Miami Dade County, and is leading a follow-up county-scale adaptive planning project for Miami Dade County. She is also currently leading the Deltares contribution to an adaptive planning (DAPP) approach for a 4-year project developing a master watershed plan in Calcasieu Parish in Louisiana.
Working experience
| 2008 - heden | Deltares | Researcher and consultant, flood risk management |
| 2012-2017 | Delft University of Technology | PhD candidate, hydraulic engineering |
| 2004 - 2007 | SAIC | Data analysis, groundwater remediation systems |
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An efficient method to account for the length effect in levee system reliability
2018 K. Roscoe, R. Jongejan, T. Vrouwenvelder, A. Hanea, Structural Safety (in review)
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System reliability with correlated components: Accuracy of the Equivalent Planes method
2015 K. Roscoe, F. Diermanse, T. Vrouwenvelder, Structural Safety, 57, 53-64,
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Bayesian networks in levee system reliability
2015 K. Roscoe, A. Hanea, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering (ICASP 12), Vancouver, Canada, July 12-15.
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Estimation of the uncertainty in water level forecasts at ungauged river locations using quantile regression
2012 Kathryn L. Roscoe, Albrecht H. Weerts & Marinus Schroevers (2012), International Journal of River Basin Management, 10:4, 383-394,
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Effect of surge uncertainty on probabilistically computed dune erosion
2011 K. Roscoe, F. Diermanse, Coastal Engineering, Vol. 58, Issue 11, 1023-1033,
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Extreme offshore wave statistics in the North Sea
2010 K. Roscoe, S. Caires, F. Diermanse & J. Groeneweg, WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, Vol 133, 47-58,
Activities
| 2018-2022 | Parish-wide watershed planning and strategic analysis using Dynamic adaptive policy pathways | Development of a parish wide master watershed plan for the 10 watersheds of Calcasieu Parish. Work includes detailed hydrodynamic modeling, damage and vulnerability assessment, qualitative adaptation pathways development with stakeholder engagement, a CIrcle analysis to determine the cascading effects of critical infrastructure, and detailed modelling in support of a fully quantitative DAPP analysis. The outcome will be an integrated actionable plan for adaptation under various future climate and socio-economic scenarios. Activities: Adaptation pathways development, tipping point analysis, damage modelling, probabilistic hazard modelling |
| 2016-2018 | Assessment of Alternative Flood Mitigation Strategies for the Little River Canal Basin in Miami, Florida | Pilot study to demonstrate the use of adaptive pathways for adaptation to sea level rise. The project focused on the Little River Canal Basin in Miami, FL, and looked at a suite of measures to reduce pluvial flood risk as sea levels rise. Stakeholder workshops were facilitated to explore and select measures and determine flood risk objectives. Hydrological and damage models were used to calculate risk, which informed the development of the pathways. The output was well-received and clearly demonstrated that go-to measures like booster pumps and raising flood walls have relatively short shelf-lives, and more transformative measures will be needed in the long-term (elevating roads and buildings). Activities: development of adaptive pathways and tipping point analysis |
| 2018-2019 | Adaptation pathways for Miami-Dade County | This project expands upon the Little River Canal Basin pilot, by scaling the area to the entire county of Miami-Dade. The project includes the development of a quick-scan model which can rapidly assess the impact of flood mitigation measures (and combinations of measures) under multiple combinations of precipitation, sea level rise, and demographic changes. The project aims to develop an integrated suite of measures and county-wide pathways which can be used to select high-potential actions to investigate in more detail. Activities: Project management, risk assessment, tipping point analysis, workshop facilitation, and adaptive pathway development |
| 2017-2019 | Risk-based inspections of the Oesterdam | The Oesterdam is a 10 km dam, and is one of the Dutch Delta works. It is subject to strict flood protection standards, which the government is responsible for maintaining, based on periodic inspections. This case study brings together a consortium of researchers, consultants, and government officials to develop a framework for connecting observations made during inspections and the flood protection level of the dam. The study further investigates the optimum frequency of inspections to ensure flood risk does not exceed tolerable thresholds. Activities: Method development, probabilistic modelling of waves and water levels, degradation modeling. |
| 2016-2018 | Adaptive strategies for strengthening levees subject to subsidence | Levees in the north of Holland are subject to uncertain subsidence, which makes the financial reservation for levee improvements challenging. This project focuses on alternatives to the current reactive approach to levee improvements, looking predominantly at risk-based approaches that can handle the uncertainty of both climate and subsidence, as well as incorporating innovative, more adaptive strategies to levee strengthening. It provides the water board with an overview of the annual costs required for the current strategy as well as alternative strategies, over long time horizons. Activities: project management, method development, reporting. |
| 2012-2017 | Bayesian networks in levee system reliability modeling | PhD research. This work focused on reliability modeling of flood defense systems using Bayesian networks. The Bayesian networks were used to (1) compute the 'length effect' in levee system failure probabilities, (2) update reliability estimates of levee systems using observations (3) improve levee assessments by incorporating expert judgment, (4) test the accuracy of system reliability methods currently used in the Netherlands, (5) estimate model error in geotechnical levee failure models, using performance observations. |