PSIPW celebrates outstanding scientific contributions to advance knowledge in sustainable water management and disaster resilience. Past recipients include Nobel Prize laureates, fellows of national science academies and the most prominent water scientists from different countries.

One of the 2024 PSIPW Surface Water Prizes is awarded to Professor Qiuhua Liang, who alongside team members Dr Huili Chen, Xiaodong Ming, Xilin Xia, Yan Xiong, and Jiaheng Zhao, develop and maintain the High-Performance Integrated hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS) for multi-hazard modelling.

First released over a decade ago, the innovative system step-changed flood modelling and risk assessment practice by achieving the first real-time prediction of the whole process of flooding from rainfall-runoff to inundation across a large catchment/city of 1000s of km2 at an unprecedented meter-level resolution.

HiPIMS has been widely applied in over 40 countries across the world and continued to develop to support multi-hazard systemic risk assessment and management including flooding, tsunami, storm surge, and landslide. More recently the system has been further developed to simulate interactive dynamics of large floating debris and integrate with data from various sources to support city-scale surface water flood forecasting, laying the foundations for a ‘digital twin’ for flooding in UK cities and catchments.

Upon receiving news of the award, Professor Liang, who directs the UNESCO Chair in Informatics and Multi-hazard Risk Reduction, said: “I am deeply honoured to be named one of the 2024 awardees of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water among some of the world’s most prominent scientists in the field of water. This is a huge recognition of our continuous effort in developing open high-performance modelling and data analytics tools for multi-hazard risk management. This is a team effort and most of the credit should go to my previous and current team members.

I hope our research can inspire more scientific endeavours in developing innovative technologies and tools for global disaster risk reduction, one of the world’s critical challenges central to UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda.”

Professor Dan Parsons, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, added: “I am delighted that Qiuhua and his team’s outstanding achievements have been recognised with this distinguished global scientific award. Increasing flood and other climatic hazards continue to cause devastating impacts on more people and property, and intensify pressure on critical infrastructure systems in the UK and across the globe. Their open access research continues to advance knowledge whilst continuously innovating to address the challenges of multi-hazard risk management.”