Identification of local thresholds of TWL for triggering the European coastal flood awareness system, Deliverable 4.3 – Report on the identification of local thresholds of TWL for triggering coastal flooding - ECFAS project (GA 101004211). www.ecfas.eu

The European Copernicus Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS) project aimed at contributing to the evolution of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (https://emergency.copernicus.eu/) by demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of a European Coastal Flood Awareness System. Specifically, ECFAS provides a much-needed solution to bolster coastal resilience to climate risk and reduce population and infrastructure exposure by monitoring and supporting disaster preparedness, two factors that are fundamental to damage prevention and recovery if a storm hits.

The ECFAS Proof-of-Concept development ran from January 2021 to December 2022. The ECFAS project was a collaboration between Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS di Pavia (Italy, ECFAS Coordinator), Mercator Ocean International (France), Planetek Hellas (Greece), Collecte Localisation Satellites (France), Consorzio Futuro in Ricerca (Italy), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), University of the Aegean (Greece), and EurOcean (Portugal), and was funded by the European Commission H2020 Framework Programme within the call LC-SPACE-18-EO-2020 - Copernicus evolution: research activities in support of the evolution of the Copernicus services. 

Description of the product

The ECFAS Deliverable 4.3 - Report on the identification of local thresholds of TWL for triggering coastal flooding aims to describe the methodology developed to identify local thresholds that will trigger the coastal flood mapping activity. To this end, it was necessary to identify both a total water level triggering threshold, used as a local reference to trigger the system in case of forecasted TWL exceedence, and a duration threshold, used to set the storm duration. In order to compute both thresholds, an Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) and a Duration Analysis (DA) were performed on the ECFAS combined hindcast. As the local TWL thresholds (triggering and duration) were identified using the ECFAS combined hindcast, and the system will instead be operative with the input of CMEMS forecast, a methodology was developed to establish a correction to be applied before integrating the thresholds into the warning system. The document also describes some limitations and possible future improvements of the employed methodology.

The Deliverable 4.3 - Report on the identification of local thresholds of TWL for triggering coastal flooding is accompanied by an accessory data file. This file, named "ThresholdsFile.csv", contains the values of the triggering and duration thresholds for all the ECFAS combined hindcast of TWL points and their coordinates.

This ECFAS Thresholds Dataset is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the ECFAS Thresholds Dataset are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/.

This Report on the identification of thresholds is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Disclaimer:

ECFAS partners provide the data "as is" and "as available" without warranty of any kind. The ECFAS partners shall not be held liable resulting from the use of the information and data provided.

This project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101004211