Project overview
This project will engage with two project partners (Environment Agency and EDF energy) with significant assets and infrastructure at risk from extreme storm surges. For both partners this project will deliver understanding of the impacts of plausible extreme coastal surge and wave events on the function, resilience, design and standard of protection of key infrastructure. It will also provide them and other Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Authorities with an improved level of understanding around current and future standards of protection. For key coastal regions – determined with our partners - we will synthesise a number of “black swan” storm surges – events that have not been observed but that are physically plausible. This has never previously been done for extra-tropical weather systems. It is important to sample storminess beyond the observed range of natural variability since our record of severe storm surges is probably too short (we have only had two extreme North Sea storm surges in 60 years – in 1953 and 2013). We will do this by analysing and grouping European storm systems from reanalysis data, and then perturbing the atmospheric systems using a well tried and tested forecasting tool (made available by the Met Office). The modified wind and pressure fields will drive coupled storm surge and wave models to create the plausible worst cases. Our work will provide a credible alternative for worst case storm surges that complements the H++ scenarios obtained from climate models alone.
The results of the project will assist our project partners and other stakeholders in planning and mitigation, the siting and protection of coastal infrastructure, and long term investment decisions. Our deliverables will take the form of: (1) 2-D data fields for storm surges and waves along the affected regions (determined with the partners); (2) new calculations of extreme value statistics for those regions; and (3) site-by-site analyses of tide/surge/wave combinations that then feed into the downstream modelling of the two partners. For the Environment Agency, the new data would feed into National and / or local flood risk and forecasting models to help understand what impacts would be associated with such events to inform investment decisions and incident preparedness. The outputs would also be used both to quality control the current best-practice statistical methods for estimation of extreme sea levels and extend those. For EDF Energy, the new data will feed into their current statistical methodology for estimating return levels of extreme sea levels and provide information that could be used in strategic decisions on probable maximum extremes and lower bounds on the 10,000-year level for different natural hazards.
The results of the project will assist our project partners and other stakeholders in planning and mitigation, the siting and protection of coastal infrastructure, and long term investment decisions. Our deliverables will take the form of: (1) 2-D data fields for storm surges and waves along the affected regions (determined with the partners); (2) new calculations of extreme value statistics for those regions; and (3) site-by-site analyses of tide/surge/wave combinations that then feed into the downstream modelling of the two partners. For the Environment Agency, the new data would feed into National and / or local flood risk and forecasting models to help understand what impacts would be associated with such events to inform investment decisions and incident preparedness. The outputs would also be used both to quality control the current best-practice statistical methods for estimation of extreme sea levels and extend those. For EDF Energy, the new data will feed into their current statistical methodology for estimating return levels of extreme sea levels and provide information that could be used in strategic decisions on probable maximum extremes and lower bounds on the 10,000-year level for different natural hazards.
Staff
Lead researcher