An important aspect of flood risk management is the issuing of timely flood alerts. The spatial, as well as temporal, scale of these warnings is important. In many situations efficient risk management may be aided by the provision of local flood predictions at a high spatial resolution. Examples of such situations include issuing warnings for small groups of outlying houses or key infrastructure locations such as power sub-stations. In this paper a methodology for providing automated, detailed and location specific warnings which are computed ‘on-site’ is presented. Copyright © 2009 Royal Meteorological Society