Δ-ENIGMA: The Dutch Delta on the Intensive-Care monitor Deltas and coastal plains are attractive places to live: fertile, flat, open to the sea. These lowlands are, however, also vulnerable to climate-change and sea-level rise. To better predict how deltas develop in the future we need a thorough understanding of how organisms, currents, waves, water&sand discharge shape the delta-landscape. This so-called biogeomorphology lies at the heart of Δ-ENIGMA, which provides infrastructure for intensive observational and experimental research of the Dutch Delta. This will improve our ability to predict future development, and help us live on happily in a changing Delta.

The programme ‘NWA – Ecological effects of offshore wind farms will advance data and knowledge underlying state-of-the-art models used within Wozep and KEC. It will do so by making use of state-of-the-art fundamental research on atmospheric, physical and biological ocean science and align it with applied research on the ecological consequences of offshore wind. This will lead to improved assumptions that form the basis of models such as Wozep and KEC which in turn form the basis for policy decision-makers.

The impact of climate change on health related to heat stress (indoor and outdoor), water quality, and plant diversity is increasing. Blue (lakes, canals) and green infrastructure (trees, herbs) may significantly contribute to reduce heat stress and the warming up of built-up areas. BENIGN aims to investigate how blue and green infrastructure can be employed in urban areas to create healthy living conditions. To do so, 3 living labs in Dutch municipalities will be set up. A key outcome of BENIGN will be a decision support system for municipalities to guide them in creating healthier living conditions.

Up to now most sea level projection where mainly for the global scale and did not consider the probability density functions in much detail. This is not sufficient for coastal management where projections for local rise are needed. Moreover for risk analyses it is important to study the extreme values, which may have only a small probability. Recent work indicates that in particular the changes in the dynamics of ice sheets may lead to skewed distributions, which need to be taken into account in total local projections of sea level. New developments in sea level research enable the start of the construction of probability density functions for the North-Sea region based on CMIP5 ensemble results. Updated calculations of the contribution of thermal expansion, glaciers and ice sheets, groundwater depletion, air pressure differences and changing wind and wave patterns will be combined in a sea level equation model that accounts for gravitational and rotational effects of the changes in mass in the ocean. Results will be validated with local data for the North-Sea region, corrected for tidal effects in order to attribute sea level changes and increase the reliability of future projections. The end result are trends and the variability in the trend of local sea level rise including a probability density function, which can be used for coastal management purposes.

River deltas are known to be threatened by sealevel rise, increased peak discharges and storm surge levels, trapping of sediment in reservoirs and engineering works. The present proposal aims to establish and understand how in delta distributary networks channel morphologies adjust to changing boundary conditions, and to quantify the impact of such adjustments on tidal propagation patterns and associated flood hazards. Two parallel PhD studies of the Pearl River Delta and the Rotterdam Rijnmond channel network are planned, based on joint hydrographic field campaigns, simulation of key morphological channel adjustments and hydrodynamic modelling of historical flow regimes. The field campaigns will be focussed on the division of water and sediment at tidally-influenced channel junctions, which have rarely been the subject of a comprehensive field study. In each of the two study areas, channel junctions will be monitored over a semidiurnal tidal cycle at neap tide and at spring tide, both during high flow and under low flow conditions. During field measurements, flow patterns, bedload and suspended load sediment transport, grain size distributions, and bed morphology will be monitored. Apart from conventional survey methods, bedload sediment transport will be estimated acoustically, using the so-called bottom tracking functionality of acoustic Doppler current profilers. The subsequent part of the planned research aims to understand mechanisms driving the dominant morphodynamic developments in the two study areas, synthesizing field measurements and simulations with morphodynamical submodels, nested in all-encompassing hydrodynamical models of the two delta regions. To yield a synoptic overview of the spatio-temporal changes in flood hazards, the hydrodynamic response to morphological adjustments under peak water level scenarios will be investigated. In a final stage, nonlinear interactions between tidal amplitudes, mean sealevel and river discharge will be analysed, to reveal the underlying physical mechanisms in detail.