MOSAIC

Coastal flooding due to tropical cyclones is one of the world’s most threatening hazards with damages amounting to hundreds of billions of euros per event. With sea levels rising and tropical cyclones intensifying, these risks are projected to increase in the future. Large-scale risk assessments have advanced rapidly in the last years, but to date they have relied on simple static models. A major scientific challenge is to move towards the application of hydrodynamic models that have high resolution and accuracy.

The aim of MOSAIC was to further advance large-scale flood risk assessment. Within the project, we have demonstrated that thousands of years of events are needed to accurately estimate risk and fully account for low-probability tropical cyclones. The large computation costs of these simulations were tackled by the use a new algorithm combined high performance computing. Moreover, MOSAIC has introduced a multi-scale method for coastal flooding, coupling various hydrodynamic models and global datasets via a Python interface. This approach is computationally efficient and globally applicable and as such paves the way for the application of large-scale flood modelling based on hydrodynamic modelling. Next possible steps include the further development of the coupling software and application at the global scale.

An additional internal eScience Center software sustainability project was awarded to generalize the software that was developed in this project and enhance its sustainability.