What's new – Emergency planning with sea-level rise from national forecast data

Aug 26, 2019

In collaboration with the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) we are proud to launch a truly unique analysis in SCALGO Live. We have coupled our traditional sea-level rise analysis with DMI's national sea-level forecasts. When you enable the new layer, which you can find in the Forecasts category in your library, a slider shows up that allows you to pick a particular point in time and see the effect of the forecasted sea-levels for that time. The DMI forecasts go 5 days into the future.

Screenshot from August 23 showing the sea-level forecast for Sun the 25th of August 2019 at 22:00. No significant flooding for this particular event. The colors in the ocean show the forecasted sea-level.

The analysis is incorporated into workspaces and is enabled when you create a workspace for Sea-level rise. We also have a sensitivity analysis to allow you to take the uncertainty in DMI's forecast into account. According to DMI, the uncertainty in the forecast is 10%. Therefore we have added checkboxes "-10%" and "+10%" that allow you to view respectively the areas that would not be flooded if the forecast was 10% lower, and the areas that would be flooded if it was 10% higher.

Since a severe increase in sea-level is not an everyday event (luckily) we have added the forecasts from three historical events: Bodil (2013), Alfrida (2019) and "Den stille storm" (2017). These work in the same way as the current forecast and allow you to experience how the system would act if a similar event was to appear in the current forecast.

The forecasted sea levels during the 2013 Bodil storm and the resulting flood risk forecast for a section of Roskilde Fjord. The screenshots shows the situation on Saturday December 7 at 3am as predicted by the forecast from Tuesday December 3.

This new feature allows emergency response teams to easily show the in-land consequences of DMI forecasts for communication with the public and for planning. In the latter case, mobile barriers, sand bags and other remedies can be placed and their effects assessed quickly and intuitively through workspaces.

You can read more about the new functionality in the manual.