<p>Climate research in Northern Germany provides important information to enable adaption to climate change. However, the increasing complexity and the amount of data that needs to be processed makes the information inaccessible for external parties outside of the climate modeling community. Since 2007 the <em>Coastal and Climate Office for Northern Germany</em> at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon has maintained a long term stakeholder dialogue. In this context, we make knowledge on coastal climate research available to the public, and to decision-makers. Our range of stakeholders consists of adjacent scientific research groups, interested individuals, governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, media, education and more.</p> <p>Web applications, such as the <em>Climate Monitor for Northern Germany</em>, play a central role in our efforts to transfer scientific knowledge to our stakeholders. Originally released in 2014, the monitor comprehends data derived from freely available climate datasets of the last few decades, such as CoastDat, eOBS, CRU TS and more. We provide derived climate information for the most-requested parameters, namely temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind, cloudiness, and vegetation but also analyze indices on extremes such as heat, severe rain fall and storms. We answer the questions of our regional stakeholders, e.g. “How does a changing climate affect our interests?”, by visualizing spatial averages (municipality to state-level scale), as well as comprehensive, interactive and comparable time-series and a descriptive interpretation of both. This tool has been proven to be a valuable asset in stakeholder communication and allows everyone to access crucial climate information for their region of interest.</p> <p>In our latest release we take user needs into account and redesign the front-end using a mixture of open-source libraries and OGC services provided by ESRI. With the re-design we introduce interactive webmaps and apps, intended to simplify navigability through this complex theme and its far-reaching visualization collection. We aim to increase user engagement through a familiar user interface, consistent with similar web applications. Our data processing pipelines have been streamlined to make the results conform to the FAIR principles. Besides the visual representation of the results, we provide download options for the raw data, and the computational methods are published open-source in the form of Jupyter notebooks. We focus on ease of maintenance, accessibility and on instantaneous publication of the latest results. In this presentation we highlight the workflows and experiences behind creating this user centric web tool, and discuss where we see the benefits of integrating web tools in knowledge transfer.</p>

Beaches are characterized by high morphodynamic activity, and high-frequency measurements are needed to understand their states and rates of change. Ideally, beach survey methods should be at once accurate, rapid and low-cost. Recently, unmanned aerial systems (drones) have been increasingly utilized to measure beach topography. In this paper, we present a review of the state of art in drones and photogrammetry for beach surveys and the respective achieved measurement quality (where reported). We then show how drones with a minimal configuration and a low-cost setup can meet the high accuracy and rapidity required for beach surveys. To test a minimal drone and ground control point configuration, we used consumer-grade equipment to perform the same flight path with different cameras and at different altitudes. We then used photogrammetry to produce digital elevation models of the beach. Using a GNSS-RTK system, we collected 2950 independent control points to evaluate the accuracy of the digital elevation models. Results show that, once a few potential sources of uncertainties in the final digital elevation model are taken into account, the average RMSE(z) of the digital elevation models was ~5 cm, with a survey efficiency of ca. 3 m 2 min −1 . Digital elevation models taken at different times were used to calculate the before–after sediment budget following a storm that hit a sandy coast in Sylt Island at the German North Sea coast.

The Wadden Sea is a unique and important intertidal coastal zone under the pressure of changing driving forces (i.e. sea level rise, storm surges and increasing tidal range). In this study, we characterize the recent morphologic evolution of the German part of the Wadden Sea for the time period 1998 to 2016 based on a large dataset of available digital elevation models. A sediment budget analysis reveals that the Wadden Sea is accumulating sediment. Changes in the ratio of intertidal to subtidal surface area indicate an extension of the intertidal zone. Most of the intertidal flats accumulate sediments with rates higher than the observed mean sea level rise in the German Bight, while simultaneously the subtidal mean depth increases. For the period of investigation this Wadden Sea steepening is quantified to averaged values of +7.9 mm/yr for the tidal flats and −20.0 mm/yr for the channels.

This study focuses on the medium scale morphodynamics of the tidal flat and channel system Fedderwarder Priel, located in the Outer Weser estuary (Wadden Sea, Germany). Tidal channels and adjacent flats are highly dynamic systems whose morphologic evolution are driven by tidal, wind, and wave forcings. These coastal environments are an important ecosystem and react to changes in hydrodynamic conditions in various spatial and temporal scales. Based on annual medium-resolution digital elevation models from 1998 to 2016, we describe changes in the surface area over depth with hypsometries and use vertical dynamic trends in order to analyze and visualize the morphologic evolution of the Fedderwarder Priel and adjacent tidal channels. It is shown that several intertidal flats rise in the order of 1.3 to 5.6 cm/year. The findings indicate that the Outer Weser estuary was not in an equilibrium state for the investigated period, and tidal flats accreted with a rate exceeding mean sea level rise.

Morphodynamics of channel-shoal and intertidal flat systems, as the Outer Weser estuary in the southern German Wadden Sea, are driven by the hydrodynamic forcing of tides, wind and waves. The latter can be differentiated into locally generated wind waves and offshore sea state. Wave forcing of intertidal environments has often been neglected in related morphodynamic modelling studies due to its complexity and the associated computational effort of two-way coupling between waves and currents. In this study, we reflect on the relative importance of each hydrodynamic driver estimated and quantified based on their individual morphological feedback highlighted for suband intertidal environments. We further evaluate channel-shoal morphodynamics in response to fair-weather conditions in comparison to an extreme

Bodenformen an der Sohle von Flüssen, Küstenzonen und flachen Schelfen sind wichtige skalenübergreifende Elemente der Küstendynamik in ihren Eigenschaften als Transportkörper von Sedimenten und ihrer Wirkung auf die Strömungsdynamik als Rauheitselemente. Neben vielen neueren Studien über die Entstehung, Gestalt und Dynamik von Bodenformen in vergleichsweise kleinen Untersuchungsgebieten ist die Arbeit von ULRICH (1973) über die Verteilung von Bodenformen in der Deutschen Bucht bis heute die einzige verfügbare zusammenhängende Darstellung für die deutsche Nordseeküste. Die analogen Karten und die Darstellung der Klassifizierung in Buchstabenkürzeln macht sie für heutige quantitative Analysen schwer zugänglich. Hier wurden diese Karten digitalisiert und Eigenschaften der Bodenformen rekonstruiert und interpretiert. Das Ergebnis ist eine Zusammenstellung digitaler Karten eines vollständigen und eines auf steile, hydrodynamisch wirksame Bodenformen reduzierten Datensatzes der Minimal, Maximalund Mittelwerte von Höhen, Längen und Steilheiten von Bodenformen in der Deutschen Bucht. Die Datensätze stehen der Allgemeinheit in der Datenbank Pangaea zur Verfügung.