An integrated marine data collection for the German Bight – Part 2: Tides, salinity, and waves (1996–2015)

Abstract

Abstract. Marine spatial planning requires reliable data for, e.g., the design of coastal structures, research, or sea level rise adaptation. This task is particularly ambiguous in the German Bight (North Sea, Europe) because a compromise must be found between economic interests and biodiversity since the environmental status is monitored closely by the European Union. For this reason, we have set up an open-access, integrated marine data collection for the period from 1996 to 2015. It provides bathymetry, surface sediments, tidal dynamics, salinity, and waves for the German Bight and is of interest to stakeholders in science, government, and the economy. This part of a two-part publication presents data from numerical hindcast simulations for sea surface elevation, depth-averaged current velocity, bottom shear stress, depth-averaged salinity, wave parameters, and wave spectra. As an improvement to existing data collections, our data represent the variability in the bathymetry by using annually updated model topographies. Moreover, we provide data at a high temporal and spatial resolution (Hagen et al., 2020b); i.e., numerical model results are gridded to 1000 m at 20 min intervals (https://doi.org/10.48437/02.2020.K2.7000.0004). Tidal characteristic values (Hagen et al., 2020a), such as tidal range or ebb current velocity, are computed based on numerical modeling results (https://doi.org/10.48437/02.2020.K2.7000.0003). Therefore, this integrated marine data collection supports the work of coastal stakeholders and scientists, which ranges from developing detailed coastal models to handling complex natural-habitat problems or designing coastal structures.

An integrated marine data collection for the German Bight – Part 1: Subaqueous geomorphology and surface sedimentology (1996–2016)

“…1) are highly complex systems of barrier islands, the world's largest coherent system of coastal tidal flats and multiple estuaries (Elias et al, 2012;Kabat et al, 2012;Benninghof and Winter, 2019). Recent research interest frequently focuses on the morpho-and hydrodynamic processes in this area, e.g., Elias et al (2012), Zijl et al (2013), Heyer and Schrottke (2015), Wang et al (2015), and Benninghof and Winter (2019). For this, numerical models of various implementations require input parameters gained from, for example, bathymetric or sedimentological datasets to gain further insight and understand longer-term processes (Zijl et al, 2013;Arns et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2018;Rasquin et al, 2020) such as the sea level rise.…”

“…The German joint project AufMod began the process of alleviating these issues with both increased temporal and spatial coverage and resolution (Heyer and Schrottke, 2015). Bathymetric regular 50 m gridded digital terrain models (DTMs) were provided from 1982 to 2012 for the inner German Bight, as well as surface sedimentological information including full discretized cumulative grain size distribution (GSD) functions for individual further processing at a 250 m grid resolution (Milbradt et al, 2015).…”

“…Bathymetric regular 50 m gridded digital terrain models (DTMs) were provided from 1982 to 2012 for the inner German Bight, as well as surface sedimentological information including full discretized cumulative grain size distribution (GSD) functions for individual further processing at a 250 m grid resolution (Milbradt et al, 2015). However, state-of-the-art modeling studies deploy horizontal grids and meshes for bathymetry and sedimentology that require an even higher resolution than AufMod's initial steps (Zijl et al, 2013;Kösters and Winter, 2014;Hagen et al, 2020;Rasquin et al, 2020;Hagen et al, 2021). With AufMod ending in 2012, the data coverage is outdated.…”

“…Part two of this publication (Hagen et al, 2021) displays hydrodynamic numerical modeling results based on the base data presented hereafter. All data products are available to download for free, if applicable, provided with additional metadata for quality and usability assessment.…”

“…The Functional Seabed Model is a holistic data-based hindcast simulation model (Milbradt et al, 2015) and was first utilized at a larger scale in the joint project AufMod (Heyer and Schrottke, 2015) to provide consistent DTMs and base data for numerical modeling and morphodynamic analyses from multiple datasets originating from separate surveys for user-defined spatial and temporal extent and validity.…”