The physical causes of coastal flooding due to marine storms are discussed. We examine the costs and impacts of storm surges and waves with reference to the UK. The mechanisms of interaction between waves and the mean circulation due to tides and wind are reviewed. A case study to illustrate the magnitude of surges, waves and their interactions is presented for Liverpool Bay in the eastern Iris...

The Thames tidal defences are the UK’s most complex and costly flood defence system and of global significance both as a feat of engineering and in terms of the value of assets protected from flooding. The system includes 200km of dikes on the Thames Estuary and the Thames Barrier, built in the 1970s to protect against a storm surge with an annual probability of 0.001 in 2030. Planning is now u...

cated on the coast and 44% of the world’s population lives within 150 km of the ocean.1 Unfortunately, coastal regions are often low-lying and thus susceptible to an increase in seasurface elevation. A storm surge is a potentially devastating rise in the sea surface caused by extratropical cyclones or by tropical cyclones such as hurricanes and typhoons. Surges can lead to large loss of human l...

The Dutch storm surge barrier’s failure rates are designed and certified to fail maximally once every ten thousand years. Recent audits question this failure rate. Software is mentioned as a major cause and quantifying it and its reliability turned out to be a problem. We show how to quantify and assess the software and its failure rates using minimal data. The results are applicable to other d...

We describe the background, architecture and implementation of a user portal for the SCOOP coastal ocean observing and modeling community. SCOOP is engaged in real time prediction of severe weather events, including tropical storms and hurricanes, and provides operational information including wind, storm surge and resulting inundation, which are important for emergency management. The SCOOP po...

[1] Detailed simulations, comparisons with observations, and model sensitivity experiments are presented for the August 2011 tropical cyclone Irene and a March 2010 nor’easter that affected the New York City (NYC) metropolitan area. These storms brought strong winds, heavy rainfall, and the fourth and seventh highest gauged storm tides (total water level), respectively, at the Battery, NYC. To ...

The Spin tool set (Spin and Xspin) was used to validate parts of the design of a storm surge barrier control system, in particular the communication interfaces with the outside world. Promela combined with Z is used to specify crucial aspects of the design. In this talk we outline our experience with the use of Spin and Promela, and discuss some ideas for extensions/improvements.

We present a framework for statistical analysis of discrete event systems which combines tools such as simulation of marked point processes, likelihood methods, kernel density estimation and stochastic approximation to enable statistical analysis of the discrete event system, even if conventional approaches fail due to the mathematical intractability of the model. The approach is illustrated wi...