ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the wider issues related to flooding and flood risk management and how the concepts of conveyance, roughness and afflux are related to these issues. The context and motivation behind this book are outlined, together with a brief description of the origins of the Conveyance Estimation System (CES) and the Afflux Estimation System (AES). The CES-AES software incorporates five main components: A Roughness Advisor, a Conveyance Generator, an Uncertainty Estimator, a Backwater Module and an Afflux Estimator. These are introduced and briefly described, together with comments concerning key assumptions and some technical limitations. An outline of the structure of the book and how it might be used in conjunction with the software is also given.
