Storm surge modelling along European coastlines: The effect of the spatio-temporal resolution of the atmospheric forcing

Abstract

The spatio-temporal resolution of atmospheric forcing plays a key role in the accuracy of simulated storm surges with hydrodynamic numerical models. Here, we generate five hydrodynamic hindcasts of coastal storm surges along the European Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea coasts, forced with atmospheric fields of varying temporal (hourly and daily) and spatial (0.25$°$ to 2$°$) resolution since 1940. Our results, that are validated with insitu tide gauge observations, show that storm surges obtained with daily forcing underestimate the magnitude of coastal extreme sea level events by up to 50% compared to hourly simulations and observations. Nevertheless, low-resolution simulations capture the temporal variability of storm surges, including strong episodes. Furthermore, taking advantage of the consistent set of coastal storm surge hindcasts, we demonstrate that storm surges forced with daily mean atmospheric fields, when bias corrected via quantile mapping, provide accurate values of daily maxima as calculated by a high-resolution hindcast. This transformation paves the way to obtain daily maxima storm surge estimates from low-resolution atmospheric fields, as those typically provided by large-scale and global climate models, at a lower computational cost.