Scalable Interactive Platform for Geographic Evaluation of Sea-Level Rise Impact Combining High-Performance Computing and WebGIS Client

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 both to the complexity of coastal models that also depend on local natural changes and anthropogenic actions and to the difficulty to actually use such large and complex datasets. In this paper, we describe a prototype of web service to quickly communicate spatial information on future flooding along the French coastal zones. We 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 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.