Compound flood drivers for northwestern Europe in high-resolution EURO-CORDEX Simulations

This dataset comprises time series of 6-hourly surges and the daily streamflow records simulated from hydrodynamic-hydrologic modelling to quantify the compound effects of surges and peak river discharge over northwestern Europe. We simulate the surge height (m) and river discharge (m3/s) at the vicinity of the coast in the reference (1981–2005) and projected (2040–2069) periods using time series of high-resolution (0.11⁰, which is about 12 km) regional dynamically downscaled meteorological forcings from the World Climate Research Program CORDEX (COordinated Regional Climate Downscaling EXperiment) framework (Nikulin et al., 2011) (https://esg-dn1.nsc.liu.se/search/esgf-liu/) for Europe, forced by five host (or parent)-GCMs from the CMIP5 project. Given data availability, we use meteorological forcing dataset from SHMI’s Rossby Centre regional atmospheric model (RCA4; Strandberg et al., 2015) driven by five host GCMs participating in CMIP5, i.e., CNRM-CERFACS-CNRM-CM5, ICHEC-EC-EARTH, IPSL-IPSL-CM5A-MR, MOHC-HadGEM2-ES, and MPI-M-MPI-ESM-LR. For each host GCM, the first ensemble member (r1i1p1) of climate realization has been used except the ICHEC-EC-EARTH model, r12i1p1 realization has been used. All simulations have the same physical version (p1) and initialization method (i1) but differ in initial states (i.e., r1 and r12). After 2005, the future scenarios diverge, and we investigate projected change in compound flood climatology during 2040 – 2069 using business as usual RCP8.5 scenario to cover extremes. While we simulate surge at 33 tide gauges using hydrodynamic model Delft3D (Delft3D-FLOW, 2014), the simulation of discharge from 39 stream gauges is performed using the global hydrological and water use model, WaterGAP 2.2d (Müller Schmied et al., 2014). Since we are mostly interested in the meteorological phenomena that drive the compound flood mechanism, we focus on modeling of surges and do not simulate tides. The individual datasets of the surge and discharge time series for each host GCMs in the GCM-RCM chains are available in the sub-folders ‘Discharge’ and ‘Surge’ under the zip-file ‘CF_drivers’.