Harnessing rainfall data for flood resilience in Scotland

Scottish Water

A publicly owned water and wastewater utility, Scottish Water provides drinking water and sewerage services to households and businesses across Scotland, delivering and treating over a billion litres of water every day on behalf of the Scottish public.

Grundfos supplied:

Grundfos Connect Rain Analytics

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The country’s greatest challenge

Scotland’s unique geography and high rainfall frequency mean flooding is the country’s greatest domestic climate adaptation challenge.

According to the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) over 284,000 properties are currently at risk from flooding, rising to nearly 400,000 by 2080. To tackle this complex issue, Scottish Water required a robust solution to proactively safeguard its assets and the communities they serve.

Since 2023, Grundfos has partnered with Scottish Water on a comprehensive rainfall analytics initiative, transforming this challenge into a data-driven opportunity for proactive resilience and optimised capital investment.

The situation

Beyond reactive management

The operational demands on Scottish Water's infrastructure are severe. With hundreds of high-risk earth-bunded reservoirs requiring physical inspection following highrainfall events – which are now a common occurrence - the need for accurate, real-time trigger data was urgent.

A core challenge for the utility was the inability to objectively and consistently measure the true effectiveness of expensive flood mitigation projects, making it difficult to justify and prioritise future, multi-million-pound investments.

Scottish Water needed a high-precision data platform to provide real-time, actionable insights capable of informing critical operational decisions and ensuring fiscal responsibility for capital expenditure. Grundfos's solution delivers this by transforming Scottish Water’s vast, complex weather data into intelligent, actionable insights, empowering flood management teams to make evidencebased decisions.

The partnership with Grundfos is key to delivering on our commitment to our customers and the environment. Their platform provides us with high-precision rainfall data and intelligence, including FEH calculations, we need to manage our assets effectively.
Bob Fleming, hydraulic modelling team lead at Scottish Water

The solution

Intelligent analytics

“Grundfos Connect Rain Analytics is designed with a high degree of flexibility, allowing us to rapidly configure and apply complex algorithms tailored to specific challenges,” explains Mike Everest, Grundfos’s Digital Solution Architect. “This agile, innovative approach enables us to deliver tangible results quickly, helping utilities meet their environmental goals more efficiently."

Grundfos's platform supplies advanced near real-time rainfall data and Flood Estimation Handbook (FEH) calculations for thousands of catchments and hundreds of reservoirs. This capability:

Generates daily and event-driven reports, flagging catchments and hundreds of high-risk reservoirs that have experienced rainfall exceeding pre-set hydrological thresholds, automatically triggering a physical inspection.
Provides the precise quantification needed for timesensitive operational decisions, allowing for immediate, preventative actions to be taken; safeguarding vital infrastructure; and significantly reducing the need for costly, manual site visits.

The outcome

Investment optimisation

A key innovation is Grundfos’s ability to analyse rainfall data at a site-specific, hyper-local scale. This unique feature provides Scottish Water with measurable "before and after" performance data, allowing them to quantify the benefits of flood mitigation projects - such as installing gates to prevent surface or sewer flooding.

By analysing precise FEH profiles before and following a mitigation effort, the system objectively measures the project’s environmental and hydrological effectiveness and financial impact. This directly addresses a major industry gap by providing the clear cost-benefit analysis needed to justify and optimise future capital investments in resilient infrastructure.

“The partnership with Grundfos is key to delivering on our commitment to our customers and the environment. Their platform provides us with high-precision rainfall data and intelligence, including FEH calculations, we need to manage our assets effectively,” explains Bob Fleming, hydraulic modelling team lead at Scottish Water. “This capability allows us to pinpoint immediate intervention, while also giving us the objective performance data required to justify and prioritise our long-term capital investment in flood mitigation."

Grundfos's solution delivers measurable environmental outcomes and strategic value, supporting Scottish Water’s environmental and regulatory commitments by providing the necessary transparency and data-driven evidence for critical infrastructure decisions.

Proactive flood risk management through near real-time insights

Grundfos Connect Rain Analytics provides advanced, near real-time rainfall data and FEH calculations, enabling Scottish Water to identify high-risk catchments and reservoirs early and take preventative action before flooding or asset failure occurs.

Reduced operational burden and cost savings

Automated, event triggered reporting flags only those sites exceeding critical rainfall thresholds, significantly reducing the need for widespread, manual inspections and cutting unnecessary site visits while maintaining safety and compliance.

Objective, site-specific performance measurement

Hyper-local rainfall analysis enables “before and after” comparison of flood mitigation interventions, giving Scottish Water clear, measurable evidence of environmental, hydrological, and financial performance at individual sites.

Optimised and defensible capital investment decisions

By providing robust cost benefit analysis and transparent performance data, the solution supports evidence based prioritisation of multi million pound flood resilience investments, aligning regulatory requirements with long-term environmental and community protection goals.

    
        This project was originally implemented by Metasphere, a company acquired by Grundfos in 2023. The full Metasphere range of remote monitoring products and solutions for water and wastewater networks and environmental applications is now available through Grundfos.