How To Protect Our Coasts - Main Results FromThe OPCOM Project

Abstract

Within the MAST project OPCOM general criteria were derived for the design of operational model systems to improve integrated coastal management. This comprised a comprehensive data and information basis, state-of-the-art but easy-to-handle and cheap information technology, sophisticated data assimilation techniques as well as long-term stability and the ability of the model systems to describe the hydrographic variability of the respective area. The improvement of long-term operability and reliability of operational and pre-operational coastal zone models has been addressed by means of sensitivity analyses of selected test calculations. Furthermore, the evaluation of sensitivity studies of the input from meteorological and large-scale hydrographic models resulted in requirements on data quality and coverage and guidelines on judgement on larger scale model data resolution and quality have been formulated. The forecast of boundary values is also of high importance for coastal models. Therefore statistically significant trends in the differences between forecasts and measurements have been established by means of analysis of residual errors of operational models and algorithms both by classical statistical methods (multi-regression techniques) and by new-generation predictive filtering methods. Finally a corresponding coastal management database was defined. Besides the development of a database structure incorporating essential information derived from (pre-) operational model systems and monitoring networks a user interaction structure for model management has been established. The application of the whole system is mainly targeted at model related data access and visualisation and comprises tasks like the display of map information from the model area, display of selected model results as e.g. time series or 2D fields and animations, and the comparison of modelled and measured data using visual comparison and statistical analyses.