Project Title: « European advances on CLImate services for coasts and SEAs »
ECLISEA is a project that aims to advance coastal and marine climate science and associated services through developing innovative research of sea surface dynamics. The project is built upon the premise that the outcomes should be applicable throughout Europe. Thanks to the coordinated work of the consortium (five multidisciplinary European leader RPOs on coastal, marine and climate services), the project has an important transnational dimension, covering the whole European coasts and seas rather than a set of local pilot studies. ECLISEA is focused on (i) collecting and developing new data and climate information by supporting harmonized analysis at European scale, (ii) investigation on climate variability, predictability and long-term projections, and (iii) of the complexity and uncertainties of the modeling frameworks.
ECLISEA proposes an integral research plan that starts with assessing the needs of specific stakeholders; includes groundbreaking investigation related to mean sea level rise, storm surge, waves, total water level and coastal flooding and erosion methodologies, and ends up with the development of an on-line open prototype of a coastal climate service in Europe. Relevant issues for climate sensitive sectors in coastal areas such as the characterization and change of extreme met-ocean conditions or the assessment of uncertainties of regional historical and future mean sea level rise are considered, as well as relatively unexplored research on wind-waves and storm surge climate predictability from seasonal to decadal time scales. ECLISEA is estimated to produce in 3 years: (i) data, models, methods and tools, (ii) a open on-line European data infrastructure with a unique atlas viewer, (iii) a set of recommendations and best practices about how to use the appropriate climate information and coastal impact assessment frameworks, (iv) its transferability to the user community, and (v) a quantifiable economic impact on relevant sectors in coastal areas.
Partners
1. UC-IHC (Spain)
Environmental Hydraulics Institute and Santander Meteorology Group
2. HZG (Germany)
Institute of Coastal Research
3. BRGM (France)
Directorate for risks and prevention and directorate for information systems
4. CNRS (France)
Laboratoire d’Etude en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiale (LEGOS)
5. NCSRD Environmental Research Laboratory, INRASTES, (Greece)

Project ECLISEA is part of ERA4CS (European Research Area for Climate Services), an ERA-NET initiated by JPI CLIMATE and co-funded by the EUROPEAN COMMISSION.