About the project
This project assesses climate change risks to assets operated by the General Lighthouse Authority of the UK and Ireland. Using GIS mapping, historical datasets, and hydrodynamic modelling, the impacts of sea-level rise, storm surges, and coastal erosion will be evaluated for supporting the resilience of these crucial and charismatic assets.
Lighthouses and other navigation assets operated by the General Lighthouse Authority (GLA) of the UK and Ireland play a vital role in ensuring maritime safety, protecting lives at sea, and supporting the smooth flow of international trade. However, climate change impacts such as rising sea level and changing hazards from waves and storm surge pose growing risks to their operation and reliability.
This project aims to understand the impact of regional sea-level rise on the hazards posed by marine natural hazards to offshore and coastal assets of the General Lighthouse Authorities of the UK and Ireland.
The doctoral researcher will start by assessing the spatial spread of GLA assets across the UK, using GIS (Geographic Information System) software. They will then map present-day risk using existing measured datasets (e.g., tide gauges and wave buoys) and modelled datasets.
They will also use metrological hindcast datasets (covering the last 200 years) to determine the characteristics of storms that generate extreme events in this area and assess past rates of sea-level rise. To assess possible changes in risk posed by climate change, the ensemble of state-of-the-art regional climate model developed for the Northwest European Shelf (Lewis et al., 2019) will be used.
The student will map how long-term effects of sea-level rise might create new hazards across the UK and Ireland, and what new GLA assets might be required in these areas. Finally, the change impacts of wave overtopping will be investigated using OpenFOAM (e.g., Chen et al., 2021) at selected case-study sites.
Supervisors
As well as Masashi Watanabe and Ivan Haigh from the University of Southampton, you will also receive supervision from:
- Lucy Bricheno: luic@noc.ac.uk from the National Oceanography Centre.
- William Dunning: William.Dunning@gla-rad.org from the General Lighthouse Authorities.
Please contact the lead supervisor if you require further information about the project.
References
Lewis, H.W., Castillo Sanchez, J.M., Siddorn, J., King, R.R., Tonani, M., Saulter, A.,Sykes, P., Pequignet, A.-C., Weedon, G.P., Palmer, T., et al., 2019. Can wave coupling improve operational regional ocean forecasts for the north-west European Shelf? Ocean Sci. 15 (3), 669–690.
Chen, W., Warmink, J.J., Van Gent, M.R.A., Hulscher, S.J.M.H., 2021. Numerical modelling of wave overtopping at dikes using OpenFOAM®. Coast. Eng. 166, 103890.
