Wave-driven flood-forecasting on reef-lined coasts early warning system (WaveFoRCE)

Abstract

Increasing the resilience of coastal communities while decreasing the risk to them are key to the continued inhabitance and sustainability of these areas. Low-lying coral reef-lined islands are experiencing storm wave-driven flood events that currently strike with little to no warning. These events are occurring more frequently and with increasing severity. There is a need along the world’s coral reef-lined coasts for a tool that can forecast the timing and severity of wave-driven flooding events. Without this tool, coastal communities are vulnerable to: loss of life from drowning • loss of, and damage to, property and infrastructure • decreasing viability of communities via loss of, and damage to crops, fishing (via decreased water quality and wave-damaged reefs), and freshwater resources • reduction of livable land due to increased erosion and salt intrusion. The currently available tools were developed for sandy shorelines and do not accurately predict wave-driven flooding on reef-lined coasts, leaving inhabitants without accurate and timely warnings. In addition, the flood models that do exist for reef-lined coasts have only been implemented on a small number of areas throughout the world because running these models is costly and requires a high level of computing power. Using these existing models and techniques to generate high-resolution forecasts for wave-driven flooding for all reef-lined coasts would cost approximately US$1 billion. To remedy this issue, an international team associated with the GEO Blue Planet initiative is working to develop a wave-driven flood-forecasting early-warning system (EWS) for coral reef-lined coasts known as WaveFoRCE. The system aims to provide all nations and people living on a coral reef-lined coast anywhere in the world with an up to 7.5-day forecast of storm wave-driven flood events.