Angélique Melet

Mercator Ocean · Scientific Directorate

Predicting the ocean state in a reliable and interoperable way, while ensuring high-quality products, requires forecasting systems that synergistically combine science-based methodologies with advanced technologies for timely, user-oriented solutions. Achieving this objective necessitates the adoption of best practices when implementing ocean forec...

Sea level rise has major impacts in Europe which vary from place to place and in time depending on the source of the impacts. Flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion lead via different pathways to various consequences in coastal regions across Europe. Flooding leads via overflow, overtopping and breaching to damage to assets, environment and peop...

Sea level rise (SLR) is a major concern for Europe, where 30 million people live in the historical 1-in-100-year event flood coastal plains. The latest IPCC assessment reports provide a literature review on past and projected SLR, and their key findings are synthesized here with a focus on Europe. The present paper complements IPCC reports and cont...

Wind waves and swells are major drivers of coastal environment changes and coastal hazards such as coastal flooding and erosion. Wave characteristics are sensitive to changes in water depth in shallow and intermediate waters. However, wave models used for historical simulations and projections typically do not account for sea level changes whether...

The EuroGOOS Coastal working group examines the entire coastal value chain from coastal observations to services for coastal users. The main objective of the working group is to review the status quo, identify gaps and future steps needed to secure and improve the sustainability of the European coastal service provision. Within this framework, our...

Sea level variations at the coast can have drastic environmental and socio-economic impacts in particular in the context of an ever-increasing coastal population and anthropogenic climate change. Regional to global climate variability influences all these factors and exerts a strong control on the coastal sea level over a wide range of time scales....

European coasts are regularly exposed to severe storms that trigger extreme water-level conditions, leading to coastal flooding and erosion. Early Warning Systems (EWS) are important tools for the increased preparedness and response against coastal flood events, hence greatly reducing associated risks. With this objective, a proof-of-concept for a...

Wind-waves are a main driver of coastal environment changes. Wave setup and runup contribute to coastal hazards such as coastal flooding during extreme water level (EWL) events. Wave characteristics used to estimate wave setup are sensitive to changes in water depth in shallow waters. However, wind-waves models used for historical simulations and p...

Projections of coastal sea level (SL) changes are of great interest for coastal risk assessment and decision making. SL projections are typically produced using global climate models (GCMs), which cannot fully resolve SL changes at the coast due to their coarse resolution and lack of representation of some relevant processes (tides, atmospheric sur...

Many different physical processes contribute to mixing in the ocean. Mixing plays a significant role in shaping the mean state of the ocean and its response to a changing climate. This chapter provides a review of some recent work on the processes driving mixing in the ocean, on techniques for parameterizing the various mixing processes in climate...

Low-lying coastal zones are home to around 10% of the world’s population and to many megacities. Coastal zones are largely vulnerable to the dynamics of natural and human-induced changes. Accurate large-scale measurements of key parameters, such as bathymetry, are needed to understand and predict coastal changes. However, nearly 50% of the world’s...

Projections of coastal sea level (SL) changes are of great interest for coastal risk assessment and decision-making. SL projections are typically produced using global climate models (GCMs) which cannot fully resolve SL changes at the coast due to their coarse resolution and lack of representation of some relevant processes. To overcome these limit...

Sea-level rise is a direct consequence of climate change. Primarily due to ocean thermal expansion and transfer from land ice (glaciers, ice sheets) to the ocean, sea-level rise is therefore an integrated indicator of climate change. Coastal zones and communities are expected to be increasingly threatened by sea level changes, with various adverse...

GLORYS12 is a global eddy-resolving physical ocean and sea ice reanalysis at 1/12° horizontal resolution covering the 1993-present altimetry period, designed and implemented in the framework of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS). The model component is the NEMO platform driven at the surface by atmospheric conditions from...

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and mo...

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and mo...

Climate change and anthropogenic pressures are widely expected to exacerbate coastal hazards such as episodic coastal flooding. This study presents global-scale potential coastal overtopping estimates, which account for not only the effects of sea level rise and storm surge, but also for wave runup at exposed open coasts. Here we find that the glob...

Coastal zones have large social, economic and environmental values. They are more densely populated than the hinterland and concentrate large economic assets, critical infrastructures and human activities such as tourism, fisheries, navigation. Furthermore, coastal oceans are home to a wealth of living marine resources and very productive ecosystem...

This article aims to provide a tour of satellite missions for Coastal Hazards Monitoring, of relevant applications, as well as the downstream International Services such as the Copernicus Ocean and Land Monitoring Services. Earth observation (EO) satellite remote sensing provides global, repetitive and long-term observations with increasing resolut...

In this study, we compare the spatial patterns of simulated geocentric sea-level change to observations from satellite altimetry over the period 1993–2015 to assess whether a forced signal is detectable. This is challenging, as on these time scales internal variability plays an important role and may dominate the observed spatial patterns of region...

Along open coasts, wind waves are a key driver of coastal changes and can be major contributors to coastal hazards. Wind wave characteristics are projected to change in response to climate change, notably due to changes in atmospheric circulation patterns and the associated surface winds. Here, a first‐order estimate of projected 20‐yr mean wave se...

Coastal zones have large social, economic and environmental values. They are more densely populated than the hinterland and concentrate large economic assets, critical infrastructures and human activities such as tourism, fisheries, navigation. Furthermore, coastal oceans are home to a wealth of living marine resources and very productive ecosystem...

The world’s coastal areas are home to about 10% of the human population and support unique and dynamic ecosystems, offering € trillions worth of environmental and societal benefits. Climate change and anthropogenic pressures are however exacerbating devastating hazards such as episodic coastal flooding, the magnitudes of which remain highly uncerta...

Surface gravity waves generated by winds are ubiquitous on our oceans and play a primordial role in the dynamics of the ocean–land–atmosphere interfaces. In particular, wind-generated waves cause fluctuations of the sea level at the coast over timescales from a few seconds (individual wave runup) to a few hours (wave-induced setup). These wave-indu...

We review the characteristics of sea level variability at the coast focussing on how it differs from the variability in the nearby deep ocean. Sea level variability occurs on all timescales, with processes at higher frequencies tending to have a larger magnitude at the coast due to resonance and other dynamics. In the case of some processes, such a...

Monitoring and Predicting Regional to Coastal Sea Level: Towards Comprehensive Observing and Modeling Systems

A major challenge for managing impacts and implementing effective mitigation measures and adaptation strategies for coastal zones affected by future sea level (SL) rise is our limited capacity to predict SL change at the coast on relevant spatial and temporal scales. Predicting coastal SL requires the ability to monitor and simulate a multitude of...

Coastal zones are highly dynamical systems affected by a variety of natural and anthropogenic forcing factors that include sea level rise, extreme events, local oceanic and atmospheric processes, ground subsidence, etc. However, so far, they remain poorly monitored on a global scale. To better understand changes affecting world coastal zones and to...

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) provides regular and systematic reference information on the physical and biogeochemical ocean and sea-ice state for the global ocean and the European regional seas. CMEMS serves a wide range of users (more than 15,000 users are now registered to the service) and applications. Observation...

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) provides regular and systematic reference information on the physical and biogeochemical ocean and sea-ice state for the global ocean and the European regional seas. CMEMS serves a wide range of users (more than 15,000 users are now registered to the service) and applications. Observation...

Turbulent mixing in the ocean is key to regulate the transport of heat, freshwater and biogeochemical tracers, with strong implications for Earth's climate. In the deep ocean, tides supply much of the mechanical energy required to sustain mixing via the generation of internal waves, known as internal tides, whose fate-the relative importance of the...

This is the AGU talk corresponding to this non peer reviewed paper:

In the version of this Article originally published, there were a number of errors in the main text, the Supplementary Information, the Methods and Figures that needed to be corrected as a result of a coding error when quantifying the wave contributions to sea level rise. In the ‘Interannual-to-multidecadal changes’ section of the main text, from t...

Coastal communities are threatened by sea-level changes operating at various spatial scales; global to regional variations are associated with glacier and ice sheet loss and ocean thermal expansion, while smaller coastal-scale variations are also related to atmospheric surges, tides and waves. Here, using 23 years (1993–2015) of global coastal sea-...

Rising sea-levels are a critical concern in small island nations. The problem is especially serious in the western south Pacific, where the total sea-level rise over the last 60 years has been up to 3 times the global average (Becker et al. 2012). In this study, we aim at reconstructing sea-levels at selected sites in the region (Suva, Lautoka – Fi...

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) provides regular and systematic reference information on the physical state, variability and dynamics of the ocean, ice and marine ecosystems for the global ocean and the European regional seas. CMEMS includes both satellite and in-situ high level products prepared by Thematic Assembly Ce...

Twentieth-century regional sea level changes are estimated from 12 climate models from phase 5 of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The output of the CMIP5 climate model simulations was used to calculate the global and regional sea level changes associated with dynamic sea level, atmospheric loading, glacier mass changes, and ice s...

Sea level change is one of the major consequences of climate change and is projected to affect coastal communities around the world. Here, global mean sea level (GMSL) change estimated by 12 climate models from phase 5 of the World Climate Research Programme’s Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) is compared to observational estimates for...

We examine the issue of sustained measurements of sea level in the coastal zone, first by summarizing the long-term observations from tide gauges, then showing how those are now complemented by improved satellite altimetry products in the coastal ocean. We present some of the progresses in coastal altimetry, both from dedicated reprocessing of the...

The Solomon Sea is a marginal sea in the southwest Pacific that connects subtropical and equatorial circulation, constricting transport of South Pacific Subtropical Mode Water and Antarctic Intermediate Water through its deep, narrow channels. Marginal sea topography inhibits internal waves from propagating out and into the open ocean, making these...

Diapycnal mixing plays a primary role in the thermodynamic balance of the ocean and, consequently, in oceanic heat and carbon uptake and storage. Though observed mixing rates are on average consistent with values required by inverse models, recent attention has focused on the dramatic spatial variability, spanning several orders of magnitude, of mi...

Global models of seafloor topography have incomplete and inconsistent resolution at horizontal wavelengths less than about 10-20 km, notably due to their inability to resolve abyssal hills in areas unsurveyed by ships (that is, about 90% of the global seafloor). We investigated the impact of this unresolved bottom roughness on global numerical simu...

High Frequency Radar (HFR) is a land-based remote sensing instrument offering a unique insight to coastal ocean variability, by providing synoptic, high frequency and high resolution data at the ocean atmosphere interface. HFRs have become invaluable tools in the field of operational oceanography for measuring surface currents, waves and winds, wit...

We examine the issue of sustained measurements of sea level in the coastal zone, first by summarizing the long-term observations from tide gauges, then showing how those are now complemented by improved satellite altimetry products in the coastal ocean. We present some of the progresses in coastal altimetry, both from dedicated reprocessing of the...

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) Ocean State Report (OSR) provides an annual report of the state of the global ocean and European regional seas for policy and decision-makers with the additional aim of increasing general public awareness about the status of, and changes in, the marine environment. The CMEMS OSR draws on...

In the coastal ocean zones, satellite altimetry data processing and interpretation poses specific difficulties, due to the interaction of the radar signal with land topography, inaccuracies in some of the geophysical corrections and to the fast changes in the sea level. In order to optimize the completeness and the accuracy of the sea surface heigh...

Sea level variations and extreme events are a major threat for coastal zones. This threat is expected to worsen with time because low-lying coastal areas are expected to become more vulnerable to flooding and land loss as sea level rises in response to climate change. Sea level variations in the coastal ocean result from a combination of different...

In this study, we explore the potential of a nearshore video system to obtain a long-term estimation of coastal variables (shoreline, beach slope, sea level elevation and wave forcing) at Grand Popo beach, Benin, West Africa, from March 2013 to February 2015. We first present a validation of the video system with field data over a 10-day experiment...

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) Ocean State Report (OSR) provides an annual report of the state of the global ocean and European regional seas for policy and decision-makers with the additional aim of increasing general public awareness about the status of, and changes in, the marine environment. The CMEMS OSR draws on...

Turbulent mixing driven by breaking internal tides plays a primary role in the meridional overturning and oceanic heat budget. Most current climate models explicitly parameterize only the local dissipation of internal tides at the generation sites, representing the remote dissipation of low-mode internal tides that propagate away through a uniform...

The ocean stores more than 90% of the energy excess associated with anthropogenic climate change. The resulting ocean warming and thermal expansion are leading contributors to global mean sea level (GMSL) rise. Confidence in projections of GMSL rise therefore depends on the ability of climate models to reproduce global mean thermosteric sea level (...

The breaking of internal tides is believed to provide a large part of the power needed to mix the abyssal ocean and sustain the meridional overturning circulation. Both the fraction of internal tide energy that is dissipated locally and the resulting vertical mixing distribution are crucial for the ocean state, but remain poorly quantified. Here we...

In this paper, a simple and generic implementation approach is presented, with the aim of transforming a deterministic ocean model (like NEMO) into a probabilistic model. With this approach, several kinds of stochastic parameterizations are implemented to simulate the non-deterministic effect of unresolved processes, unresolved scales, unresolved d...