Objectives

Most of the existing forecast and early warning systems rely on the prediction of hydrodynamic conditions at the coast, or exceptionally on flood computations inland, but under deep simplifications. Recent scientific progresses now allow properly modeling coastal flooding events. Such models are nevertheless very expensive in terms of computation time (>hours) which prevents any use for forecast and warning or even for estimating the coastal flood hazard return period together with uncertainties.

RISCOPE aims at addressing part of these challenges by developing a risk-based method contributing to forecast, early-warning and prevention of coastal flooding risks. In this bottom-up approach, the starting point is the key information useful for decision making (e.g. water level on a strategic asset). This allows to produce targeted warnings but also to identify all the scenarios that may lead the flood to exceed given thresholds. The method should be robust, fast and integrate the complexity of coastal flood processes (e.g. overtopping, interaction with structures) and cascade effect (e.g. coastal defense failure).

RISCOPE should thus constitute a breakthrough alternative to existing systems and methods by proposing real-time computations for events of few days at local scale.