Action Areas

FLAME identifies five broad sets of interlinked activities that must be collectively addressed by its partners throughout the UN Ocean Decade, in multiple regional coastal ocean environments:

  • Assess the performance of future coastal ocean projections by:

    1. Understanding and quantifying the strengths and limitations of different downscaling and regional Earth System Modelling approaches
    2. Assessing the performance of current CMIP and other global models in the coastal ocean
    3. Understanding the multiple causes of model uncertainty and how to reduce them 

  • Develop new and strengthen existing regional Earth System Models by:

    1. Improving model resolution and developing multi-scale approaches
    2. Improving the representation of physical, biogeochemical, ecosystem, and sedimentary coastal ocean processes, including forcing, bathymetry and parameterisations
    3. Working to improve model coupling (land-ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere-seabed) and thereby also process fidelity 

  • Develop new downscaling approaches and improve hazard information products by:
    1. Advancing downscaling ability using dynamical models and statistical approaches
    2. Establishing computationally cheap and rapidly deployable downscaling tools
    3. Improving probabilistic hazard assessments, vulnerability functions and indicators on relevant regional-local scales 

  • Advance observation-model co-analysis and data assimilation by:
    1. Drawing together coastal ocean observations to create snapshots of the current state of the Global Coastal Ocean that can be used to ground-truth regional models and identify process interactions and the scale of natural variability and trends
    2. Calibrating and validating regional Earth System Models against coastal observations 
    3. Developing data assimilation methodologies that improve climate projections 

  • Improve understanding of the global coastal oceans response to future climate by:

    1. Identifying regime shifts and tipping points
    2. Identifying the primary drivers of future change
    3. Disentangling the impacts of anthropogenically forced climate change, natural climate variability and the consequences of direct human activity
    4. Identifying ‘hotspot’, local, regional and global scale climate and ecosystem impacts and vulnerabilities