During the UN Ocean Decade, FLAME aims to establish a Global Coastal Ocean Model Intercomparison Programme (GCO-MIP) that will provide climate change impacts and hazard assessments to the next and future IPCC reports.

While climate change is increasingly better understood and modelled on global scales, climate impacts are most acutely felt across the coastal ocean, where rapidly expanding human populations are reliant upon coastal ecosystem resources and services and where they are most vulnerable to coastal hazards. Downscaling global and regional climate models to reliably project change in the coastal ocean however, where the land, ocean and human populations are intimately connected, is challenging.

FLAME provides a set of high-level objectives and a framework within which the international research community can work together to improve high-resolution projections of the global coastal oceans responses to future climate, on decadal to centennial scales, and strengthen understanding of the impacts that this will have on coastal ecosystems, hazards and services.

 Contact us

Email: jholt@noc.ac.uk

High-level Objectives of FLAME

  • Improve

    To make better decadal-centennial scale projections of the coastal ocean under future climate at local, regional and global scales, to elucidate the primary drivers of change (atmosphere vs land vs cryosphere vs ocean vs human) and to understand how climate change signals propagate between ocean basins and local coastal scales

  • Identify

    To recognise and understand the local to global scale impacts of future coastal ocean change on coastal hazards, and the health, vulnerability, resilience and adaptability of coastal ecosystems, habitats and human populations.

  • Provide

    To produce next-generation coastal ocean projections, downscaling approaches, predictive, hazard and vulnerability assessment tools that provide pathways to better informed decision making and management strategies, and that support adaption and mitigation solutions on local-regional scales

  • Establish

    To create a co-ordinated community of future coastal ocean model practitioners and analysts who will work towards a Global Coastal Ocean Model Intercomparison Programme (CO-MIP) that will provide climate change impacts and hazard assessments to the next and future IPCC reports

FLAME Workshop 2023 - Overview

The purpose of this workshop was to bring together an international community of scientists to discuss and develop the key action areas of FLAME.

View the video on YouTube

Find out more about FLAME