DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6778807
title: ECFAS Pan-EU Flood Catalogue, D5.4 – Pan-EU flood maps catalogue - ECFAS project (GA 101004211), https://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:

Le Gal, M., Fernández-Montblanc, T., Duo, E., Montes Perez, J., Cabrita, P., Souto Ceccon, P., Gastal, V., Ciavola, P., and Armaroli, C.: A new European coastal flood database for low–medium intensity events, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 23, 3585–3602, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-23-3585-2023, 2023.

Description of the Dataset

The present database gathers flood and velocity maps for the European Union coast as well as their associated forcing parameters. The coast is divided into geographic regions embracing similar oceanographic conditions and subsequently into coastal sectors. The coastal sectors can be identified by its region index RXXX and its own index CSYYY. For each coastal sector, flood models were developed using the LISFLOOD-FP model with a grid resolution of 100 m. The flood model configuration follows the recommendation highlighted in ECFAS Deliverable D5.2 - Validated LISFLOOD-FP model for coastal areas. The flood and velocity maps are associated with synthetic storms that are characterised by a specific extreme water level and storm duration. These parameters were derived from Extreme Value Analyses performed on the ECFAS ANYEU-SSL hindcast (ECFAS D4.1 - Report on the calibration and validation of hindcasts and forecasts of TWL and D4.3 - Report on the identification of local thresholds of TWL for triggering coastal flooding). Five extreme water level values for each coastal point of the hindcast, and three durations (12, 24 and 36 h) were identified leading to 15 scenarios for each coastal sector. The flood and velocity maps are gathered into a NetCDF file for each coastal sector indicating the scenario parameters as attributes. In addition, the extreme water level values used for each coastal sector are contained in a complementary NetCDF file.

The shapefile of the polygons defining the coastal sectors as defined for the catalogue implementation is included in the database.

- The ECFAS Flood Catalogue was used to produce the associated ECFAS Pan-EU Impact Catalogue:

Impact Catalogue in Zenodo: Duo, E., Montes Pérez, J., Le Gal, M., Souto Ceccon, P.E., Cabrita, P., Fernández Montblanc, T., and Ciavola, P., 2022. ECFAS Pan-EU Impact Catalogue, D5.4 – Pan-EU flood maps catalogue - ECFAS project (GA 101004211). www.ecfas.eu [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.677865

Impact Catalogue Reference literature: Duo, E., Montes, J., Le Gal, M., Fernández-Montblanc, T., Ciavola, P., and Armaroli, C.: Validated probabilistic approach to estimate flood direct impacts on the population and assets on European coastlines, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 25, 13–39, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-25-13-2025, 2025.

 

The Flood Catalogue is accompanied by a technical document describing methods, datasets, structure, format and content of the ECFAS Flood and Impact Catalogues:

Duo, E., Le Gal, M., Souto Ceccon, P.E., Montes Pérez, J., 2022. Technical document on the ECFAS Flood and Impact Catalogue, D5.4 – Pan-EU flood maps catalogue - ECFAS project (GA 101004211). www.ecfas.eu

 

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

This technical document describing methods, datasets, structure, format and content of the ECFAS Flood and Impact Catalogues is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

*The size of the uncompressed dataset is 124 GB.

 

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