Development of coastal-FEWS: early warning system tool development

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Simone De Kleermaeker, Wiebke Jager, Ap van Dongeren

Chair(s): dr. Sanchez Arcilla

Tuesday 30 june 2015

11:00 - 11:15h at Central America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Special session, (ST) Coasts at threat in Europe

Parallel session: 5H. Special session: Coasts at threat in Europe

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Coastal zone risks are likely to increase due to a combination of increased coastal hazards (inundation, wave attack, coastal erosion) due to climate change and an increase in economic development in the coastal zone. Thus, there is a need to protect coastal infrastructure and population through regional and national disaster risk reduction strategies. An essential ingredient in these strategies is forecasting, early-warning and decision support systems (EWS/DDS), which are typically applied to critical coastal areas. The challenges for developing a modern EWS are found in the integration of large data sets, specialized modules to process the data, and open interfaces to allow easy integration of existing modeling capacities. In response to these challenges, Delft-FEWS provides a state of the art EWS framework, which is highly customizable to the specific requirements of an individual organization. For coastal applications, the EWS component is a 2D model train of hydro-meteo and morphological models which computes hazard intensities. From the hazard intensity for every hazard type and the attributes (density, sensitivity and value) of every receptor type, the total expected impact can be obtained using the DSS. In the EU-funded project RISC-KIT, the robustness and applicability of the coastal EWS/DSS tool will be demonstrated on case study sites on the coasts of all EU regional seas with diverse geomorphic settings (open coasts, lagoons, salt marshes, deltas and estuaries), forcing (tides, surges, waves) and hazard types (erosion, overtopping, coastal rain-driven flash floods). For these areas, EWS are developed to provide real-time (short-term) forecasts and early warnings based on generic tools so that a common functionality across Europe can be achieved. An important innovation of the EWS/DSS lies in its application in dual mode: as a forecast and warning system and as a consistent ex-ante planning tool to evaluate the long-term vulnerability due to multiple (low-frequency) coastal hazards, under various climate-related scenarios.