The 1 March 2008 case

The influence of input resolution

In the course of time a number of changes have been made to input resolution, both in space and in time. The highest possible resolution presently obtainable is 11 km and every hour.
However, the 11 km resolution is not available for the operational model, which therefore uses 22 km input which is produced by deleting every other grid row and column. Furthermore, although hourly input is nowadays standard, 3-hourly input has been a standard for a long time.
To assess the effect on the forecasts, the storm surge model has been rerun with all 4 variants: 11 km and 22 km and hourly and 3-hourly.

This page allows to browse through the time series of total water level and surge for a series of locations from Vlissingen up to Cuxhaven. Forecasts are without data assimilation.
The green curves are with 11 km input, the orange with 22 km input. The solid curves use hourly input, the dashed and 3-hourly input. The violet curves are observations.

Differences between 11 km and 22 km input are small. However, 3-hourly input gives some loss of detail and in the peak of the surge the surge can be somewhat less.

Select the forecast