Comparative analysis of coastal flooding vulnerability and hazard assessment at national scale

The evaluation of coastal hazard and vulnerability caused by storm conditions is an important issue related to coastal flooding and erosion. Although these topics have been widely tackled by past researches, they cannot be avoided, but need to be carefully managed by local authorities in order to limit damage to coastal infrastructures, to protect human life, habitats and sensitive species. Usually, this issue is tackled through common approaches at regional scale. This paper illustrates the first steps of a research project aimed to assess coastal hazard and vulnerability to wave induced flooding at national scale. In order to apply the method at national scale, it is necessary to select a suitable data set. This has to be homogeneous on the whole application area, concerning its spatial distribution, reliability and availability. Thus, one of the aims of the project is to perform a sensitivity analysis related to the availability of information at national scale. A comparative analysis was performed for the area of Montalto di Castro (Tyrrhenian Sea) by using datasets with different spatial resolutions. The results inspection revealed that using of low resolution data does not affect significantly the estimated nearshore wave features, while the wave runup in underestimated by about 25%. This underestimation influences also the vulnerability and hazard assessment.