Coastal inundations are an increasing threat to the lives and livelihoods of people living in low-lying, highly-populated coastal areas. According to a World Bank Report in 2005, at least 2.6 million people may have drowned due to coastal inundation, particularly caused by storm surges, over the last 200 years. Forecasting and prediction of natural events, such as tropical and extra-tropical cyclones, inland flooding, and severe winter weather, provide critical guidance to emergency managers and decision-makers from the local to the national level, with the goal of minimizing both human and economic losses. This guidance is used to facilitate evacuation route planning, post-disaster response and resource deployment, and critical infrastructure protection and securing, and it must be available within a time window in which decision makers can take appropriate action. Recognizing this extreme vulnerability of coastal areas to inundation/flooding, and with a view to improve safety-related services for the community, as a fundamental priority of the WMO, the Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) and the WMO Commission for Hydrology (CHy) have initiated this project. Its purpose is to address the challenges faced by coastal communities to enhance their safety and to support sustainable development, through the improvement of coastal inundation forecasting and warning systems at the regional scale.

The goal of the Coastal Inundation Forecasting Demonstration Project (CIFDP) is to show how coastal inundation forecasting products can be improved and effectively coordinated with warning services provided by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs). This process facilitates primarily by the WMO Technical Commissions, in cooperation with a consortium of experts and related institutions of excellence in the field of storm surge, wave and hydrological flooding in order to deal with the coastal inundation matter from the viewpoint of the Total Water Level Envelope (TWLE)[1]. The CIFDP contribute to the improvement of the interaction of the national operational forecasting agencies e.g. National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) with Disaster Management Agencies (DMAs), through an integrated coastal management strategy, including the development of preparedness, response and management strategies of storm surges and waves associated with coastal inundation. These strategies are to built on the basis of hazard and vulnerability maps and related information by developing scenarios, for the use of DNAs. These scenarios are basis for disaster preparedness, and could provide valuable assistance to national partners involved in recovery and reconstruction activities.

[1] The 1^st JCOMM Symposium on Storm Surges (2-6 October 2007, Seoul, Korea), taking into account the emerging awareness of the need to promote the storm surge activity, strongly recommended to improve prediction for total water levels that is the real source of risk in coastal areas comprising tide, wave, surge and other factors.

Fakhruddin working as a System Developer for the CIFDP and Member of PSG.