Presenter: Maialen Irazoqui (Mercator Ocean International)

Description:
European coasts are often exposed to severe storms that trigger extreme water-level conditions, leading to coastal flooding and erosion. In recent years, several storm events have demonstrated the vulnerability of coastal European stretches to such natural hazards and the potential for severe socio-economic damages. These highlight the urgency of implementing an operational system at the European scale able to provide useful and timely information on coastal flood risk from extreme sea level events, for preparedness and response purposes. As such, a proof-of-concept for a European Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS) is being developed as part of a European Union’s Horizon 2020 project. ECFAS could contribute to the evolution of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. ECFAS uses state-of-the-art coastal monitoring and forecasting technologies and datasets suited to regional-to-local scale assessments. For its early-warning component, ECFAS capitalizes on the ocean forecasting systems operated by the Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS). Such forecasts are combined with a coastal-stretch-specific, pre-computed flood catalog to provide inundation depths and extents. Consecutively, the ECFAS-Rapid and Risk and Recovery Mapping component is activated which allows an operational assessment of the socio-economic impact of marine storms. In the presentation, we focus on the skill of the ocean hydrodynamic models that provide the marine hazard component to the system. Their skill to represent extreme water-levels for historical storms is evaluated in terms of peak magnitudes and timing. We evaluate their skill to independently and correctly flag upcoming extreme events, which will determine the activation of the cascading parts of the system, as well as the impact of forecasting lead times. Finally, we identify the source of the prediction misfits and provide recommendations for the evolution of the CMEMS ocean models for coastal flooding applications