Towards a scalable architecture for climate adaptation services: illustration of challenges through future coastal flooding assessments

Fabrice Dupros (1) , Agnès Tellez-Arenas (1) , Gonéri Le Cozannet (1) , Robin Quique (1) , François Paris (1) , Faïza Boulahya (1) , Sylvestre Leroy (1) , François Robida (1)

1 BRGM - Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM)

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.

Mots clés: climate change; information system; web service

Domaines: Sciences de la Terre

Fabrice Dupros, Agnès Tellez-Arenas, Gonéri Le Cozannet, Robin Quique, François Paris, et al.. Towards a scalable architecture for climate adaptation services: illustration of challenges through future coastal flooding assessments. Our Common Future under Climate Change (CFCC) Conference : International scientific conference, Jul 2015, Paris, France. 2015. ⟨hal-01196799⟩