Towards a scalable architecture for climate adaptation services: illustration of challenges through future coastal flooding assessments
Abstract
As climate is changing, more applied information on its impacts is required to inform adaptation planning. It is a
fact that during the last decade, the amount of information relevant for climate change impact assessment has grown
drastically. This can be particularly illustrated in coastal areas, where a most important recent development has
been the delivery of precise and accurate topography obtained by LiDAR at regional to national scales. However,
these developments have not led to easier assessment of coastal climate change impacts. This is due to (1) the
complexity of coastal models that also depend on local natural changes and anthropogenic actions and (2) the
difficulty to actually use such large and complex datasets.
This raises the following questions: can such complex and heterogeneous datasets be used for an efficient
communication of future flooding affected by sea-level rise and climate change? How to communicate the related
uncertainties? What infrastructure is needed to support the development of such services?
One of the major challenges in the design of this class of information system is to tackle both the volume and
the heterogeneity of the data required to build relevant climate services. Contributions from wingspan projects
(Copernicus, EarthCube, EPOS), have demonstrated the feasibility of such architecture. The scalability of the
components lying at the heart of these global systems is therefore critical in order to handle large data sets,
to integrate complex coastal models and also to deliver near real-time quantitative flooding scenarios. We
will therefore discuss several issues related to data architecture at large scale, on-the-fly (geo)-processing
capabilities, management of asynchronous workflows and data diffusion strategies in the context of international
standards such as INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe).
We finally describe a prototype of web service to quickly communicate spatial information on future flooding
along the French coastal zones that takes into account the related uncertainties. We believe that our flexible
architecture, mainly reusing off-the-shelf components is able to improve both complex scenarios analysis for
experts and dissemination of these future coastal changes to the general public.