Coastal Design Sea Levels: Extreme Sea Levels for UK Coast (2018)

Coastal Design Sea Levels - Coastal Flood Boundary Extreme Sea Levels (2018) is a GIS dataset from the UK Environment Agency and partner organizations providing extreme sea level and surge information for the UK coastline. It contains extreme sea level values for 16 different annual probabilities of exceedance, including confidence bounds and predicted astronomical tide levels. The dataset supports present-day (2018) coastal planning and does not account for future climate change impacts like sea level rise.

Use Cases

• Coastal flood modeling based on extreme sea level probabilities.
• Scheme design for coastal defenses using design sea level values.
• Strategic planning for flood risk using confidence bounds and surge information.
• Flood risk assessments for UK coastal areas based on 2018 conditions.

Strengths

• Contains data for 16 distinct annual probabilities of exceedance, providing detailed risk gradation.
• Includes confidence levels (5% and 95% bounds) for statistical reliability assessment.
• Produced by a formal partnership of UK environmental agencies (EA, SEPA, NRW, DfINI).

Limitations

• Dataset is limited to present-day (2018) conditions and does not include future climate change projections.
• Key metadata such as row count, column names, and specific license details are missing from all sources.
• Predicted tide levels (MHWS, HAT) are included for some sites but explicitly not for navigational use.

Provenance

Source

Environment Agency (UK) in partnership with SEPA, NRW, and DfINI.

Collection Method

Likely derived from tidal gauge analysis and statistical modeling, though the exact method is not specified.

Time Range

2018 (present-day conditions)

Freshness

2026-04-07 14:24:07.652360

Geography

Coastline of the UK, including England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, and Jersey.