Coastal Flooding by Extreme Events The Coastal Flooding by Extreme Events (CoFEE) Project

The CoFEE project will investigate the present and future flood risk due to extreme storms at coastal sites in the eastern Irish Sea. It will consider both the rate of coastal flooding and the extent of inundation. It will access an extensive historical coastal dataset and will exploit the extensive contemporary field data collected by the POL Coastal Observatory. Coastal flooding models will be evaluated and parameterisations will be optimised to obtain the best agreement between the observations and the model predictions. The project will also examine changes to the speed and extent of coastal flooding attributable to changes in the mean sea level and extreme events in accord with global climate change predictions. It will identify those coast types most sensitive to inundation as a result of extreme events and how the risk will change in the future. In addition, simple morphological models will be used to assess the consequences of natural coastal evolution with respect to coastal flooding. The paper is intended to inform and initiate dialogue between researches engaged in similar projects and end users concerned with managing and adaptation to changes in coastal storm frequency and severity. It is believed that global warming carries with it the possibility of an increase in the intensity of extreme coastal flooding events (Hunt, 2002; Houghton, 2005). In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) states that it is likely that a trend of increasing heavy precipitation events, intense cyclone activity and incidence of extrem