A brief overview of the OPW Coastal Section

Jim Casey, Chartered Engineer, Coastal Section

With sea-level rises predicted to be an ongoing problem for coastal communities, the OPW Coastal Section plays a vital role within the overall Flood Risk Management area.

This business unit, which is currently staffed by five Engineers, undertakes a number of key functions:

• It provides an advisory service to support the preparation of annual coastal funding programmes and the development of national policy and strategy in relation to coastal flooding and coastal change.

• It develops and manages programmes to enhance the coastal flood forecasting and warning capacity within OPW and Ireland.

• It undertakes risk assessments associated with coastal flooding and coastal erosion at selected sites making used of innovative technologies and methodologies.

• It also participates in and promotes important research considered relevant to the above.

The unit is managing and overseeing numerous projects with important deliverables in 2021. Some of these include:

• The Irish Coastal Wave and Water Level Modelling Study 2018 (ICWWS-2018) – a national scale project to update the estimates of extreme water levels and wave conditions around the coast of Ireland. This study takes account of additional available sea level, wind and wave data since the completion of previous associated studies. The project will also fill a significant gap in coastal knowledge in Ireland through the development of an up-to-date surface to relate Mean Sea Level to Ordnance Datum Malin. The study has just recently been completed and the outputs have now been published on the OPW web portal FloodInfo.ie.

• The Coastal Data Viewer - a project being developed in conjunction with the FRM Data Management Section with the aim of collating, quality controlling and making available all OPW spatial Coastal Information System (CIS) datasets on an easy to use internal web viewer. Phase 1 of the project was completed in March 2020 and is currently available to view internally on the OPW DataHub homepage (see sample below). Phase 2 of the project is ongoing and involves adding additional datasets and functionality to the Coastal Data Map Viewer, which is also externally available on the OPW web portal FloodInfo.ie Coastal Map.

Sample View of Galway Bay from Coastal Data Viewer