A European database of resources on coastal storm impacts

Abstract

Detailed information on coastal storm impacts is crucial to evaluate the degree of physical and economic damage caused by floods, implement effective recovery actions for risk prevention and preparedness, and design appropriate coastal zone management plans. This article presents a new database containing information on extreme storm events that generated impacts and flooding along European coastlines between 2010 and 2020. The storm events, associated with specific locations, are used to define test cases that are subsequently employed to retrieve information from different extreme coastal storms that hit the same area. The database collects items organized in worksheets and constitutes an inventory of resources with different types of information that is employed to characterize a storm event (i.e. hydrodynamics and weather information) and its consequences (impacts, flood extent, etc.). The guidelines and polygons (in GeoJSON format) that define the domain of the sites are also provided along with the database. The database contains 11 coastal storm events, 26 sites, 28 test cases, and 232 resources, and it has been designed to allow the addition of new events and resources. Descriptive statistical analyses were performed to define the types and topics addressed by the resources and the distribution of the resource types per country. Lastly, an example of the application of the database to European-scale flood modelling is provided. The European Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS) database is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6538416 (Souto-Ceccon et al., 2021).