Draft:Paul Bates (hydrology)

Paul David Bates CBE FRS is Professor of Hydrology at the University of Bristol and Chairman of Fathom, a water risk intelligence firm. He was Director of the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute of the Environment from 2011-2013 and subsequently Head of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences (2013-2017).

In 2012, Bates was awarded the Lloyd’s of London Science of Risk prize for his work on numerical solutions of the local inertial form of the shallow water equations. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2015 and received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2017. He was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to flood risk management in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.

Education
Bates is a graduate of the University of Southampton, where he completed a B.Sc. in Geography in 1989 before moving to University of Bristol to study for a PhD., graduating in 1993. His PhD research analysed finite element methods for modeling flood flows.

Career
Bates has published over 270 papers in international journals, which have been cited more than 38,000 times, as well as writing for The Conversation and The Guardian.

He is noted for the development of the LISFLOOD-FP hydrodynamic model which solves the local inertial form of the shallow water equations in two dimensions, with channel flows represented as a sub-grid scale feature. The numerical scheme employed in LISFLOOD-FP allows its application to continental-to-global scale domains at spatial resolutions below 100m, for both present day and future conditions under scenarios representing climate and socio-economic change. The code, or clones of it, are now used by multiple engineering firms, insurers, banks, governments, research firms and NGOs around the world to help manage and mitigate flood risk.

To validate these predictions Bates uses data from optical and synthetic-aperture radar satellites in combination with airborne and ground data to quantify their uncertainty. Currently, Bates is one of the lead UK scientists working on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT), a satellite altimeter that measures the Earth’s surface water every 21 days. Bates was a member of the mission's original working group and continues to be a member of the Mission Science Team. SWOT is a joint development between NASA and Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), with contributions from the United Kingdom Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Entrepreneurship
In 2013 Bates co-founded Fathom, a flood risk analytics firm based in Bristol, UK, with his then PhD students Chris Sampson and Andy Smith and academic colleague Jeff Neal.