Abstract
Abstract. High resolution wind fields are necessary to predict the occurrence of storm flood events and their magnitude. Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) created a catalogue of detailed wind fields of 39 historical storms at the German North Sea coast from the years 1962 to 2011. The catalogue is used by the Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Wasser-, Küsten- und Naturschutz (NLWKN) coastal research center to improve their flood alert service. The computation of wind fields and other meteorological parameters is based on the model chain of the DWD going from the global model GME via the limited-area model COSMO with 7 km mesh size down to a COSMO model with 2.2 km. To obtain an improved analysis COSMO runs are nudged against observations for the historical storms. The global model GME is initialised from the ERA reanalysis data of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). As expected, we got better congruency with observations of the model for the nudging runs than the normal forecast runs for most storms. We also found during the verification process that different land use data sets could influence the results considerably.
Highlights
Storm floods at coastal regions are natural phenomena occuring at irregular intervals and variable intensity
To improve their flood model, highly-resolved spatial and temporal wind fields of severe storms are necessary, which are provided by the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD)
The model chain of the DWD consists of the global model GME (Majewski et al, 2002) and the limited-area nonhydrostatical model COSMO (COSMO model documentation, 2014), which is run in the two versions COSMO-eu and COSMO-de
Summary
Storm floods at coastal regions are natural phenomena occuring at irregular intervals and variable intensity. The three biggest storm floods at the German North Sea coast in the 20th century occurred in the years 1962, 1976 and 1999. The central target of the project “OptempS-MohoWif” (High resolution modelling of wind fields for optimization of empirical storm flood predictions) is an improvement of the regional storm flood alert service at the North Sea coast of Lower Saxony. The second part concerning water level modeling is done by the flood alert service of Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Wasser-, Küstenund Naturschutz (NLWKN). To improve their flood model, highly-resolved spatial and temporal wind fields of severe storms are necessary, which are provided by the DWD.
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