scholarly journals Storm surge in the Adriatic Sea: observational and numerical diagnosis of an extreme event

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 371-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Zampato ◽  
G. Umgiesser ◽  
S. Zecchetto
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Storm Surge ◽  
Hydrodynamic Model ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
Extreme Event ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Limited Area ◽  
Wind Fields ◽  
Northern Adriatic

Abstract. Storm surge events occur in the Adriatic Sea, in particular during autumn and winter, often producing flooding in Venice. Sea levels are forecasted by numerical models, which require wind and pressure fields as input. Their performances depend crucially on the quality of those fields. The storm surge event on 16 November 2002 is analysed and simulated through a finite element hydrodynamic model of the Mediterranean Sea. Several runs were carried out, imposing different atmospheric forcings: wind fields from ECMWF analysis, high resolution winds from the limited area model LAMI and satellite observed winds from QuikSCAT (NASA). The performance of the hydrodynamic model in each case has been quantified. ECMWF fields are effective in reproducing the sea level in the northern Adriatic Sea, if the wind speed is enhanced by a suitable multiplying factor. High resolution winds from LAMI give promising results, permitting an accurate simulation of the sea level maxima. QuikSCAT satellite wind fields produce also encouraging results which claim, however, for further research.

scholarly journals A new high-resolution BOLAM-MOLOCH suite for the SIMM forecasting system: assessment over two HyMeX intense observation periods

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Mariani ◽  
M. Casaioli ◽  
E. Coraci ◽  
P. Malguzzi
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Storm Surge ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Precipitation Forecast ◽  
Limited Area ◽  
Forecast Performance ◽  
Northern Adriatic ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Forecasting System ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. High-resolution numerical models can be effective in monitoring and predicting natural hazards, especially when dealing with Mediterranean atmospheric and marine intense/severe events characterised by a wide range of interacting scales. The understanding of the key factors associated to these Mediterranean phenomena, and the usefulness of adopting high-resolution numerical models in their simulation, are among the aims of the international initiative HyMeX – HYdrological cycle in Mediterranean EXperiment. At the turn of 2013, two monitoring campaigns (SOPs – Special Observation Periods) were devoted to these issues. For this purpose, a new high-resolution BOlogna Limited Area Model-MOdello LOCale (BOLAM-MOLOCH) suite was implemented in the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) hydro–meteo–marine forecasting system (SIMM – Sistema Idro-Meteo-Mare) as a possible alternative to the operational meteorological component based on the BOLAM model self-nested over two lower-resolution domains. The present paper provides an assessment of this new configuration of SIMM with respect to the operational one that was also used during the two SOPs. More in details, it investigates the forecast performance of these SIMM configurations during two of the Intense Observation Periods (IOPs) declared in the first SOP campaign. These IOPs were characterised by high precipitations and very intense and exceptional high waters over the northern Adriatic Sea (acqua alta). Concerning the meteorological component, the high-resolution BOLAM-MOLOCH forecasts are compared against the lower-resolution BOLAM forecasts over three areas – mostly corresponding to the Italian HyMeX hydrometeorological sites – using the rainfall observations collected in the HyMeX database. Three-month categorical scores are also calculated for the MOLOCH model. Despite the presence of a slight positive bias of the MOLOCH model, the results show that the precipitation forecast turns out to improve with increasing resolution. In both SIMM configurations, the sea storm surge component is based on the same version of the Shallow water HYdrodynamic Finite Element Model (SHYFEM). Hence, it is evaluated the impact of the meteorological forcing provided by the two adopted BOLAM configurations on the SHYFEM forecasts for six tide-gauge stations. A benchmark for this part of the study is given by the performance of the SHYFEM model forced by the ECMWF IFS forecast fields. For this component, both BOLAM-SHYFEM configurations clearly outperform the benchmark. The results are, however, strongly affected by the predictability of the weather systems associated to the IOPs, thus suggesting the opportunity to develop and test a time-lagged multi-model ensemble for the prediction of high storm surge events.

Extreme wave events attribution using ERA5 datasets for storm-surge studies in the northern Adriatic sea

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Porcu ◽  
Leonardo Aragão ◽  
Margherita Aguzzi ◽  
Andrea Valentini ◽  
Sisay Debele ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Storm Surge ◽  
Wave Height ◽  
Extreme Events ◽  
Significant Wave Height ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
Extreme Event ◽  
Measured Data ◽  
Northern Adriatic Sea ◽  
Northern Adriatic ◽  
Historical Series

<p>Extreme hydro-meteorological events are often defined by the statistical analysis of some parameter that measures the strength of the event over a long enough time series. The parameter could refer to the intensity of the event in terms of energy or to the impact of the event on the environment. This attribution becomes even more relevant when used as reference for future climate projections, suggesting a possible increase in the number of extreme events considering the attribution applied to the past database. <br>In the literature concerning storm-surge, the use of significant wave height (Hs) percentiles to define thresholds of an extreme event is a common practice when dealing with sufficiently long datasets. Usually, this value ranges from 90th up to 99.5th trying to highlight about 3-6 Hs peaks per year. But, in fact, thresholds should provide a benchmark for how much a region can withstand an extreme event. The Italian coast of the northern Adriatic is recently increasing its sensitivity to such episodes, that threaten one of the most active touristic hub of Italy, the highly valuable Po Delta UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and city of Venice fragile structure. Recently in late 2019, a strong event hit Venice with high tides flooding the city's main monument, St. Mark's Basilica, for the 6th time in 1200 years, with levels very similar to the worst event in history in 1966. <br>Attempting to better understand the distribution of these extreme events throughout last decades and how reanalysis products can be useful for storm-surge studies, this paper presents a climatological comparison of significant wave height data extracted from ECMWF ERA5 against the entire historical series available to the Nausicaa wave buoy. This station, owned and managed by ARPAE, is located about 8 km offshore the Municipality of Cesenatico, where the seabed is about 10m, and since 2007 has been used to monitor and prevent sea level related events. In the last 12 years, at least 10 extreme events have been reported based on hourly measured data in Nausicaa and the damage observed along the coast, allowing the local authorities to define Hs thresholds as 1.5 m to significant events and 3.0 m for extreme events. However, analysing the measured data in this period, at least 26 events that exceeded the 3 m threshold were observed, representing the percentile 99.81th of the historical series, whereas only 10 storm-surge events resulted in damage to cities or environmental protection areas. When analysing Hs extracted from ERA5 at the nearest grid point to Nausicaa (~ 30 km) for the same 26 events, all events were correctly identified by reanalysis and represented with an averaged correlation of 0.96. For Hs series extracted from ERA5, values above 3 m reached the 99.83rd percentile for the same period from 2007 to 2018, and 99.84th when expanded to the last 30 years (since 1989), showing that, although quite restricted, the 99.8th percentile seems to be a good value for identifying extreme events of storm-surge in the northern Adriatic Sea.</p>

scholarly journals High resolution climate projection of storm surge at the Venetian coast

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1135-1142 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Mel ◽  
A. Sterl ◽  
P. Lionello
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Storm Surge ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Surface Wind ◽  
Wind Fields ◽  
Sea Level Pressure ◽  
Weather Forecasts ◽  
Level Pressure

Abstract. Climate change impact on storm surge regime is of great importance for the safety and maintenance of Venice. In this study a future storm surge scenario is evaluated using new high resolution sea level pressure and wind data recently produced by EC-Earth, an Earth System Model based on the operational seasonal forecast system of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The study considers an ensemble of six 5 yr long simulations of the rcp45 scenario at 0.25° resolution and compares the 2094–2098 to the 2004–2008 period. EC-Earth sea level pressure and surface wind fields are used as input for a shallow water hydrodynamic model (HYPSE) which computes sea level and barotropic currents in the Adriatic Sea. Results show that a high resolution climate model is needed for producing realistic values of storm surge statistics and confirm previous studies in that they show little sensitivity of storm surge levels to climate change. However, some climate change signals are detected, such as increased persistence of high pressure conditions, an increased frequency of windless hour, and a decreased number of moderate windstorms.

Seismic evidence of the Messinian events in the Adriatic basin

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Lanzoni ◽  
Anna Del Ben ◽  
Edy Forlin ◽  
Federica Donda ◽  
Massimo Zecchin
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
Carbonate Platform ◽  
Primary Role ◽  
Seismic Profiles ◽  
Northern Adriatic ◽  
Platform Margin ◽  
Gargano Promontory ◽  
Po Delta ◽  
Adriatic Basin

<p>The Adriatic basin represents one of several restricted basins located in the Mediterranean Area. It consists of the foreland of three different orogenic belts: the Dinarides to the East, active during the Eocene, the Southern Alps to the North, active since the Cretaceous time, and the Apennines to the West, active since the Paleogene. The Apennines had a primary role during the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC), conditioning the connection between the Adriatic basin, the Ionian basin, and the proto-Tyrrhenian basin. During the Messinian, the present Adriatic Sea was characterized by shallow water domains, where gypsum evaporites initially deposited and often successively incised or outcropped. </p><p>In the past 50 years, a massive dataset, composed of 2D multichannel seismic data and boreholes, was collected, covering almost the whole Adriatic basin in the Italian offshore. In this work, we interpreted the Plio-Quaternary base (PQb), based on available public datasets and on seismic profiles present in literature, which provided regional information from the northernmost Trieste Gulf (Northern Adriatic Sea) to the Otranto Channel (Southern Adriatic Sea). Here, we propose the PQb time-structural map, obtained by analyzing more than 600 seismic profiles. The PQb represents both the Messinian erosion and/or the top of the Messinian evaporites. It is characterized by a high-amplitude reflector, commonly called “horizon M” in the old literature. Principal findings concerning the Messinian event are summarized as below: </p><p>-The Northern Adriatic (Gulf of Trieste, Gulf of Venice, Po delta, Kvarner Area) reveals widespread channelized systems produced by the initial decrease of the sea level, followed by subaerial erosion, related to further sea level decrease. High-grade erosion involved the nearby Adriatic carbonate platform in the Croatian offshore, where deep valleys, filled with Last Messinian or post- Messinian sediments, cut through the limestones.</p><p>-The Central Adriatic (from the Po delta to the Gargano Promontory) displays a higher evaporites accumulation than the northern sector. Meanwhile, the Mid-Adriatic Ridge was already developing, along with the Apennine Chain, which was in a westernmost position. Erosional features in the deeper area are related to channelized systems, which followed the evaporites deposition. Meanwhile, also the Mid-Adriatic Ridge was affected by erosion.</p><p>-The Southern Adriatic (from the Gargano Promontory to the Otranto Channel) is characterized by the Mesozoic Apulia carbonate platform, covered by a thin Cenozoic sequence affected by subaerial erosion or non-deposition. The platform margin and the slope leading to the deepest South Adriatic basin, where a Messinian gypsum layer, also recorded in the Albanian and Croatian offshore, shows a lower level of upper erosion.</p><p>In general, we notice strongly variable thicknesses of the horizon M, which is related to submarine erosion (channels), subaerial erosion (discontinuous surfaces), non-deposition (possible unconformity), and tilting toward the surrounding chains (deepening horizons). In this work, we evaluate these different components from a regional point of view.  </p>

scholarly journals Assessing storm surge hazard and impact of sea level rise in the Lesser Antilles case study of Martinique

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 1559-1571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yann Krien ◽  
Bernard Dudon ◽  
Jean Roger ◽  
Gael Arnaud ◽  
Narcisse Zahibo
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level Rise ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Storm Surge ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Lesser Antilles ◽  
Adaptation Measures ◽  
Worst Case ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. In the Lesser Antilles, coastal inundations from hurricane-induced storm surges pose a great threat to lives, properties and ecosystems. Assessing current and future storm surge hazards with sufficient spatial resolution is of primary interest to help coastal planners and decision makers develop mitigation and adaptation measures. Here, we use wave–current numerical models and statistical methods to investigate worst case scenarios and 100-year surge levels for the case study of Martinique under present climate or considering a potential sea level rise. Results confirm that the wave setup plays a major role in the Lesser Antilles, where the narrow island shelf impedes the piling-up of large amounts of wind-driven water on the shoreline during extreme events. The radiation stress gradients thus contribute significantly to the total surge – up to 100 % in some cases. The nonlinear interactions of sea level rise (SLR) with bathymetry and topography are generally found to be relatively small in Martinique but can reach several tens of centimeters in low-lying areas where the inundation extent is strongly enhanced compared to present conditions. These findings further emphasize the importance of waves for developing operational storm surge warning systems in the Lesser Antilles and encourage caution when using static methods to assess the impact of sea level rise on storm surge hazard.

Climatology and process-oriented analysis of the Adriatic sea-level extremes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jadranka Sepic ◽  
Mira Pasaric ◽  
Iva Medugorac ◽  
Ivica Vilibic ◽  
Maja Karlovic ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
The South ◽  
Northern Adriatic ◽  
Atmospheric Waves ◽  
Tidal Forcing ◽  
Atmospheric Processes ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Adriatic Coast

<p>The northern and the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea are occasionally affected by extreme sea-levels known to cause substantial material damage. These extremes appear due to the superposition of several ocean processes that occur at different periods, have different spatial extents, and are caused by distinct forcing mechanisms.</p><p>To better understand the extremes, hourly sea-level time series from six tide-gauge stations located along the northern and the eastern Adriatic coast (Venice, Trieste, Rovinj, Bakar, Split, Dubrovnik) were collected for the period of 1956 to 2015 (1984 to 2015 for Venice) and analysed. The time series have been checked for spurious data, and then decomposed using tidal analysis and filtering procedures. The following time series were thus obtained for each station: (1) trend; (2) seasonal signal; (3) tides; (4-7) sea-level oscillations at periods: (4) longer than 100 days, (5) from 10 to 100 days, (6) from 6 hours to 10 days, and (7) shorter than 6 hours. These bands correspond, respectively, to sea-level fluctuations dominantly forced by (but not restricted to): (1) climate change and land uplift and sinking; (2) seasonal changes; (3) tidal forcing; (4); quasi-stationary atmospheric and ocean circulation and climate variability patterns; (5) planetary atmospheric waves; (6) synoptic atmospheric processes; and (7) mesoscale atmospheric processes.</p><p>Positive sea-level extremes surpassing 99.95 and 99.99 percentile values, and negative sea-level extremes lower than 0.05 and 0.01 percentile values were extracted from the original time series for each station. It was shown that positive (negative) extremes are up to 50-100% higher (lower) in the northern than in the south-eastern Adriatic. Then, station-based distributions, return periods, seasonal distributions, event durations, and trends were estimated and assessed. It was shown that the northern Adriatic positive sea-level extremes are dominantly caused by synoptic atmospheric processes superimposed to positive tide (contributing jointly to ~70% of total extreme height), whereas more to the south-east, positive extremes are caused by planetary atmospheric waves, synoptic atmospheric processes, and tides (each contributing with an average of ~25%). As for the negative sea-level extremes, these are due to a combination of planetary atmospheric waves and tides: in the northern Adriatic tide provides the largest contribution (~60%) while in the south-eastern Adriatic the two processes are of similar impact (each contributing with an average of ~30%). The simultaneity of the events along the entire northern and eastern Adriatic coast was studied as well, revealing that positive extremes are strongly regional dependant, i.e. that they usually appear simultaneously only along one part of the coast, whereas negative extremes are more likely to appear along the entire coast at the same time.</p><p>Finally, it is suggested that the distribution of sea-level extremes along the south-eastern Adriatic coast can be explained as a superposition of tidal forcing and prevailing atmospheric processes, whereas for the northern Adriatic, strong topographic enhancement of sea-level extremes is also important.</p>

Multiple drivers of extreme sea levels in the northern Adriatic Sea

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Ferrarin ◽  
Piero Lionello ◽  
Mirko Orlic ◽  
Fabio Raicich ◽  
Gianfausto Salvadori
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level Rise ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
Northern Adriatic Sea ◽  
Relative Sea Level ◽  
Northern Adriatic ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
Extreme Sea Levels ◽  
Relative Sea Level Rise

<p><span><span>Extreme sea levels at the coast result from the combination of astronomical tides with atmospherically forced fluctuations at multiple time scales. Seiches, river floods, waves, inter-annual and inter-decad</span></span><span><span>al dynamics and relative sea-level rise can also contribute to the total sea level. While tides are usually well described and predicted, the effect of the different atmospheric contributions to the sea level and their trends are still not well understood. Meso-scale atmospheric disturbances, synoptic-scale phenomena and planetary atmospheric waves (PAW) act at different temporal and spatial scales and thus generate sea-level disturbances at different frequencies. In this study, we analyze the 1872-2019 sea-level time series in Venice (northern Adriatic Sea, Italy) to investigate the relative role of the different driving factors in the extreme sea levels distribution. The adopted approach consists in 1) isolating the different contributions to the sea level by applying least-squares fitting and Fourier decomposition; 2) performing a multivariate statistical analysis which enables the dependencies among driving factors and their joint probability of occurrence to be described; 3) analyzing temporal changes in extreme sea levels and extrapolating possible future tendencies. The results highlight the fact that the most extreme sea levels are mainly dominated by the non-tidal residual, while the tide plays a secondary role. The non-tidal residual of the extreme sea levels is attributed mostly to PAW surge and storm surge, with the latter component becoming dominant for the most extreme events. The results of temporal evolution analysis confirm previous studies according to which the relative sea-level rise is the major driver of the increase in the frequency of floods in Venice over the last century. However, also long term variability in the storm activity impacted the frequency and intensity of extreme sea levels and have contributed to an increase of floods in Venice during the fall and winter months of the last three decades.</span></span></p>

scholarly journals The Adriatic Sea modelling system: a nested approach

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Zavatarelli ◽  
N. Pinardi
Keyword(s):  
General Circulation ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Northern Adriatic ◽  
Dense Water Formation ◽  
Main Circulation ◽  
Forecasting System ◽  
Modelling System ◽  
Circulation Characteristics

Abstract. A modelling system for the Adriatic Sea has been built within the framework of the Mediterranean Forecasting System Pilot Project. The modelling system consists of a hierarchy of three numerical models (whole Mediterranean Sea, whole Adriatic Sea, Northern Adriatic Basin) coupled among each other by simple one-way, off-line nesting techniques, to downscale the larger scale flow field to highly resolved coastal scale fields. Numerical simulations have been carried out under climatological surface forcing. Simulations were aimed to assess the effectiveness of the nesting techniques and the skill of the system to reproduce known features of the Adriatic Sea circulation phenomenology (main circulation features, dense water formation,flow at the Otranto Strait and coastal circulation characteristics over the northern Adriatic shelf), in view of the pre-operational use of the modelling system. This paper describes the modelling system setup, and discusses the simulation results for the whole Adriatic Sea and its northern basin, comparing the simulations with the observed climatological circulation characteristics. Results obtained with the northern Adriatic model are also compared with the corresponding simulations obtained with the coarser resolution Adriatic model. Key words. Oceanography: general (continental shelf processes; numerical modelling) – Oceanography: physical (general circulation)

Relocatable Tide Prediction and Storm Surge Forecasting

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Prime
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
Storm Surge ◽  
Marine Environment ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Extreme Event ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Early Warning Systems ◽  
Coastal Communities ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
Storm Surge Forecasting

The marine environment represents a large and important resource for communities around the world. However, the marine environment increasingly presents hazards that can have a large negative impact. One important marine hazard results from storms and their accompanying surges. This can lead to coastal flooding, particularly when surge and astronomical high tides align, with resultant impacts such as destruction of property, saline degradation of agricultural land and coastal erosion. Where tide and storm surge information are provided and accessed in a timely, accurate and understandable way, the data can provide: 1. Evidence for planning: Statistics of past conditions such as the probability of extreme event occurrence can be used to help plan improvements to coastal infrastructure that are able to withstand and mitigate the hazard from a given extreme event. 2. Early warning systems: Short term forecasts of storm surge allow provide early warnings to coastal communities enabling them to take actions to allow them to withstand extreme events, e.g. deploy flood prevention measures or mobilise emergency response measures. Data regarding sea level height can be provided from various in-situ observations such as tide gauges and remote observations such as satellite altimetry. However, to provide a forecast at high spatial and temporal resolution a dynamic ocean model is used. Over recent decades the National Oceanography Centre has been a world leading in developing coastal ocean models. This paper will present our progress on a current project to develop an information system for the Madagascan Met Office. The project, C-RISC, being executed in partnership with Sea Level Research Ltd, is translating the current modelling capability of NOC in storm surge forecasting and tidal prediction into a system that will provide information that can be easily transferred to other regions and is scalable to include other hazard types The outcome, an operational high-resolution storm surge warning system that is easy to relocate, will directly benefit coastal communities, giving them information they need to make effective decisions before and during extreme storm surge events.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document