Copernicus Service catalogue

The application presents a range of European coastal indicators, including water levels, tidal ranges and ocean surface wave parameters under the impacts associated with climate change up the 2100. The indicators are useful for various coastal sectors and studies, for example assessing coastal flooding, coastal erosion, infrastructure planning and adaption studies.

This application is underpinned by the C3S datasets ‘Water level change indicators for the European coast from 1977 to 2100 derived from climate projections’. The oceanic wave indicators are calculated with ECMWF’s Stand-Alone Wave model (SAW) and the water-level indicators are calculated with Deltares Global Tide and Surge Model (GTSMv3.0) hydrodynamic model. These models were forced with meteorological data from ERA5 reanalysis (2001 to 2017) and a EURO-CORDEX model output for a historical period (1977 to 2005) and two future periods for different representative concentration pathways (2041 to 2070 for RCP 8.5 and 2070 to 2100 for RCP 4.5), termed ‘Reanalysis' & ‘Historical’, ‘RCP4.5’, ‘RCP8.5’ within the application.

The projections of these climate scenarios are based on a single combination of the regional and global climate models, users of these data should take in consideration that there is an inevitable underestimation of the uncertainty associated with this dataset.

The application consists of an interactive map centred on the European coastal domain with 4 selectable layers for given time-slices and scenarios. The map presents the tidal, sea-level and wave indicators spatially data aggregated onto marine regions or projected on to a regular latitude/longitude grid (a course and fine resolution, i.e., 1 degree and 0.1 degree). A “number of points” layer is included to give an indication of the density of data points when projected on to a regular grid. These points are called ‘station data’ and the density of these points are higher in coastal areas, versus open ocean, please refer to the dataset documentation for further details.

When spatial aggregation is set to "Marine regions", users can click on a marine region produce the focused view. The boxplot of all data points within that region for the 4 time-slices and scenarios. The marine regions are sourced from the "Marine Ecoregions of the World" openly available from the world-wildlife-fund.

When the spatial aggregation is set to "Coarse grid" or "Fine grid" users can click on a point on the interactive map to produce a focused view of that location. The focussed view contains a box plot of all the grid points within a given radius (default = 1.0°) of that point and a line plot presents the value of the closest station (non-interpolated data point). Users can select the radius using the input field. This focussed view can also be opened by searching a coastal city in the search field in the top right of the interactive map.

User-selectable parameters

• Indicator: One of the 14 indicators listed in the input variables table
• Spatial aggregation: Course grid, fine grid or marine regions.
• Statistic: Multi-model ensemble statistic or return period. Only available for a subset of the indicators, please refer to the input variables table for more details