DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6538416
title: Database of extreme events, test cases selection and available data, Deliverable 5.1 – ECFAS Project (GA 101004211), www.ecfas.eu

description: The European Copernicus Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS) project aimed at contributing to the evolution of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (https://emergency.copernicus.eu/) by demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of a European Coastal Flood Awareness System. Specifically, ECFAS provides a much-needed solution to bolster coastal resilience to climate risk and reduce population and infrastructure exposure by monitoring and supporting disaster preparedness, two factors that are fundamental to damage prevention and recovery if a storm hits.

The ECFAS Proof-of-Concept development ran from January 2021 to December 2022. The ECFAS project was a collaboration between Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS di Pavia (Italy, ECFAS Coordinator), Mercator Ocean International (France), Planetek Hellas (Greece), Collecte Localisation Satellites (France), Consorzio Futuro in Ricerca (Italy), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), University of the Aegean (Greece), and EurOcean (Portugal), and was funded by the European Commission H2020 Framework Programme within the call LC-SPACE-18-EO-2020 - Copernicus evolution: research activities in support of the evolution of the Copernicus services. 

Reference literature:

Souto-Ceccon, P. E., Montes, J., Duo, E., Ciavola, P., Fernández-Montblanc, T., and Armaroli, C.: A European database of resources on coastal storm impacts, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 1041–1054, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1041-2025, 2025.

Description of the product

Deliverable 5.1 is a comprehensive inventory of extreme coastal events that produced flooding at different locations along the European coastline. It includes the collection and identification of events, locations and available information on the test cases.

The purpose of the ECFAS database is to provide a source of information on extreme coastal events and locations that experienced coastal flooding, considering both hazard and impact aspects. Thus, the database collects events, sites and available information to support further investigation on specific test cases. Test cases are defined here as specific sites where an extreme event that generated flooding and damage occurred. The time frame considered for the analysis is between 2010 and 2020 in order to use recent satellite imagery with good resolution and including, if possible, overlap with Sentinel missions.

The product includes three files: 1) an Excel file with the inventory; 2) an accompanying report that includes the guidelines to use the inventory, other relevant information on the method used to implement the inventory and the sources of information; 3) the test cases polygons in .geojson format.

This ECFAS Database is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/.

This Report is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

Disclaimer:

ECFAS partners provide the data "as is" and "as available" without warranty of any kind. The ECFAS partners shall not be held liable resulting from the use of the information and data provided.

This project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101004211