Global climate change is increasing the odds of more extreme weather events taking place which will have higher intensity and longer duration. Strong winds and high sea levels generate more large waves and drive them much closer to the UK's shore than before. The coastline, offshore platforms, renewable energy converters and marine vessels are battered by storms, and their integrity is placed under the threat of violent wave impact. Such extreme events also challenge the emergency landing of aircraft in the sea particularly ditching helicopters as well as the launch and recovery operations of lifeboats from larger vessels under high sea states. To mitigate the uncertainties and risks posed by such natural hazards on the public safety and the economic activity of the UK, it is vital for research, industry and governmental bodies to improve the design of coastal and offshore structures through the accurate prediction of the extreme wave loadings and the resultant damage by the development and use of high-fidelity new generation free surface modelling tools, which combine mathematical and physical science as well as the latest software engineering technology. The overall aim of this project is to develop such a powerful numerical tool to enable academics and industrial users to gain new scientific insights and better understanding of the air entrainment process in wave breaking. This will help determine the critical aeration level and distribution before/within/after wave breaking, and predict the characteristics of the resultant impact loadings on coastal and offshore structures through CFD simulation. This will be accomplished by re-engineering and extending the capabilities of an existing novel compressible multiphase hydro-code incorporating an advanced two-fluid hybrid turbulence modelling approach, fluid surface tension and adaptive high order numerical discretisation schemes deployed by state-of-the-art HPC facilities. The availability and use of the tools and data produced by the project will firmly support academics and engineers to modify/improve the designs of crucial defence systems in order to address increasing environmental challenges, protect valuable personal and public assets, safeguard local residents and commuters, and ensure the integrity of transport lines. This will help to maintain the economic-environmental-societal competitiveness and long-term sustainable development of the UK.

Offshore windfarms will expand significantly over the next decades as coastal nations adopt clean-energy infrastructures. Such initiatives are a welcome response to climate change, and the UK aims to quadruple offshore wind capacity and power all homes by 2030. The scale and rapidity of this development within the southern North Sea is unprecedented, and its impact on Europe's largest and best-preserved prehistoric landscape, Doggerland, will be substantial. Within the last twenty years, globally innovative, UK research has begun to reveal the vast prehistoric landscape beneath the North Sea that was lost to sea level rise after the last glacial. Doggerland is the first, and only landscape of its kind, where research has achieved the position that archaeological investigation is now feasible. There remain, however, significant gaps in our knowledge. Whilst we know much about the physical landscape of Doggerland, its rivers, lakes and valleys, no evidence for settlement or in situ activity is known from the offshore zone of the North Sea, and our understanding of the communities who lived there is little better than that of the pioneers of our discipline over a century ago. Ultimately, the most significant staging ground for the last hunter-gatherers of Northwest Europe is, outside of disparate chance finds, unaccounted for. Consequently, it is questionable whether adequate curatorial protocols exist nationally, or internationally, to fully mitigate the impact that development will have on this exceptional national resource. If immediate action is not taken, we risk damaging or destroying unique and unrecorded archaeological resources. Moreover, access to explore this incredibly rich and unique heritage will be significantly limited or lost following development. Academics, developers and curators must work together to devise mitigation strategies that assist green development and provide critical cultural information before the opportunity for exploration of Doggerland is lost. Conventional means of archaeological prospection used in terrestrial or shallow-water surveys are not viable for deeper offshore waters. However, extensive, detailed mapping of Doggerland allows us to determine where accessible prehistoric land surfaces exist, where settlement or activity areas may be located, and where targeted archaeological prospection may be carried out with success. Recent research has identified two such areas. The first is the estuary of the submarine, Southern River, off the East Anglian Coast, the second is the Brown Bank, equidistant between the UK and Belgium. Both of these sites are associated with significant prehistoric finds and are accessible to investigation. Using high-resolution geophysics, autonomous vehicle survey, high-resolution vibracoring, grab sampling, and surface dredging, the project will recover archaeological, environmental and sedimentological data, and provide the first evidence for in-situ, deep-water archaeological settlement. This information, supported by the extensive landscape data derived from seismic mapping, will be used to generate models identifying areas of the North Sea that have greatest potential to provide settlement evidence. Within development zones, where future access will be limited, mitigation activities will be informed using data, developed during the project, indicating areas that are both accessible and likely to provide evidence of human activity. In the short time available, the project will provide the opportunity for UK and European academics to work with national curators and developers through a network established by the project. This partnership will disseminate the experience gained from survey on the Brown Bank and Southern River and provide the evidence we require both to understand and protect the exceptional archaeological resource contained within the North Sea, and to support the UK's national green energy strategy.

Climate change is expected to result in stronger and more frequent winds, storms and sea level rise, leading to more severe adverse effects on infrastructure such as flooding damage to buildings, power stations, railways and sea defences. The effects of this natural hazard have been frequently seen in recent flooding events in the UK and other countries worldwide. Over recent years, Royal HaskoningDHV has reported that wind effects on wave overtopping has become an increasing concern for the design of modern sea defences and the management of coastal flood risk. This threat can cause unexpected coastal flooding and pose additional flooding risks to coastal infrastructure, particularly in the UK as an island nation. Currently, there is no reliable tool to quantify such risk. Present engineering practice is to either (i) ignore wind effects, which would put protected areas at risk, or (ii) include a large safety margin, which would significantly increase the cost of coastal defences unnecessarily. The safety margin method is also restricted to existing known coastal scenarios and cannot provide reliable assessment of the risks as climate changes. This is a clear knowledge gap that causes a growing concern for the ability to adequately and economically control coastal flood risk. The proposed project brings together leading experts from Manchester Metropolitan University, Royal HaskoningDHV, HR Wallingford, Environment Agency, EDF Energy and Torbay Council to address the concerns by developing a novel assessment tool to quantify wind effects on wave overtopping. Its aim is to translate the powerful two-fluid model from Manchester Metropolitan University into an engineering tool to quantify wind effects on wave overtopping, accounting for the effects of sea level rise. The objectives are to (a) adapt an advanced in-house two-fluid model for wind effects on wave overtopping, (b) validate the model rigorously against physical modelling tests undertaken at HR Wallingford, field data and real engineering application cases including ongoing or recently completed projects with the Environment Agency, SEPA and EDF Energy by Royal HaskoningDHV, (c) build a companion database to facilitate efficient assessment of the risk in design and management, and (d) enclose the tool and database in a simple user-friendly interface for efficient management and control of coastal flooding. Key activities also include visits to Heysham and Torbay for the collection of sea defence data and past event data where wind effects were significant on wave overtopping. The project partners will contribute to the supervision and steering of the project and provide real cases and data. This will be the first practical tool for accurately quantifying wind effects on wave overtopping. It will inform and improve current engineering practice, removing the need for large safety margins to account for wind effects in infrastructure design and assessment. The main deliverables and outputs will be an assessment tool and a companion database. These tools will be used by Royal HaskoningDHV in the flood risk assessment, engineering design and coastal flood forecasting system, by EDF Energy to enhance the assessment of risks of coastal flooding to existing and new build power plants, by the Environment Agency for an improved coastal flood warning service and by Torbay Council for improving the flood risk management and supporting decisions relating to future development and emergency planning. The developed tool has the potential to become a vital design tool in assessing wind effects on wave overtopping, benefiting various organisations such as the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Natural Resources Wales, Network Rail and Transport Scotland for the multiple purposes of planning strategic or investment decisions in management of coastal flooding risks to infrastructure. The project will last 14 months with a total cost of £159k at 80% FEC.

Historical disposal of wastes from domestic and industrial sources often took place with little regard for potential environmental impacts. Wastes were often deposited in landfills that can release potential pollutants to the surrounding environment. Such 'legacy landfill' sites are a particular concern in coastal areas where they are likely to be affected by increased flooding, greater erosion and more extreme cycles of wetting and drying as our climate changes. Managing such environmental issues is of critical importance, but currently we do not have a systematic framework by which we assess and understand the nature of the risks posed by different waste types in coastal areas. Given the UK's rich industrial past, there are a wide range of legacy wastes deposited in estuarine and coastal settings such as municipal waste, mine wastes, steel industry by-products, metal-rich wastes from smelting and chemical process wastes. This proposal brings together a team of researchers specialising in assessing the environmental risks of legacy wastes to (1) provide a national assessment of the environmental risks associated with legacy landfills in the coastal zone, and (2) provide a framework for effective management of these risks now and in the future. The first part of the project will bring together various national databases (e.g. on location of landfills, mining waste, coastal erosion rates, coastal management plans) to provide a single map-based database of legacy landfills within the coastal zone. We will then liaise with regional specialists in government agencies and academia to collate detail on documented risks and identify high risk priority sites (e.g. those with the greatest contamination risk and / or those most affected by erosion or flooding). This will allow us to produce an overview of the different types of waste in coastal landfills, assess the broad risks posed by them (e.g. pollutant release, physical erosion etc.) and consider potential options for resource recovery from these sites (e.g. scrap metals that could be recycled). The second component of the project will improve our understanding of the environmental behaviour of different waste types in coastal settings. Most risk assessments for wastes are undertaken assuming they will be in contact with freshwater (e.g. leaching tests that simulate wastes in contact with rainfall). We will provide a significant advance on assessing environmental risks in coastal settings by testing how pollutants are released from different waste types (e.g. municipal waste, mine waste, processing wastes) under a range of environmental conditions. These conditions will simulate the current and future environmental scenarios in coastal areas such as variations in salinity and extremes of wetting and drying that are anticipated with climate change. Crucially, we will undertake experiments that test how these wastes behave across a range of experimental scales (e.g. from beaker sized experiments, through skip-sized experiments, to measurements at real sites). This is important to have confidence that small scale laboratory experiments give us information on how pollutants are released from waste that matches with data from real field sites. Such information is crucial for extending the risk assessments completed in part one of the project. Effective long term management of legacy wastes relies on many different agencies working together (e.g. councils, regulators, land owners, engineers). The final part of the project will therefore bring various stakeholders together in different parts of the UK to (1) evaluate approaches to remediation, and (2) consider management priorities put forward by the early stages of the project. A series workshops will take place in the different administrations of the UK to produce a national management framework for legacy wastes in the coastal zone.