Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Looking for evidence of climate change impacts in the eastern

Abstract. Although storminess is often cited as a driver of long-term coastal erosion, a lack of suitable datasets has only allowed objective assessment of this claim in a handful of case studies. This reduces our ability to understand and pre-dict how the coastline may respond to an increase in “stormi-ness ” as suggested by global and regional climate models. With focus on 16 km of the Sefton coastline bordering the eastern Irish Sea (UK), this paper analyses available mea-sured datasets of water level, surge level, wave height, wind speed and barometric pressure with the objective of finding trends in metocean climate that are consistent with predic-tions. The paper then examines rates of change in shoreline position over the period 1894 to 2005 with the aim of estab-lishing relationships with climatic variability using a range of measured and modelled metocean parameters (with tim