UPC researcher Corrado Altomare receives a Leonardo Grant to study how heavy swell can affect seaside promenades
Researcher Corrado Altomare, at the Maritime Research and Experimentation Channel (CIEM) of the UPC Maritime Engineering Laboratory. Image: BBVA Foundation.
Grants to promote scientific research
Leonardo Grants are awarded to fund personal projects presented by researchers aged between 30 and 45 who are at a decisive moment in their careers, allowing them to conduct their research with greater flexibility. In this year’s call, only 58 projects out of 1,116 have received the grant.
Corrado Altomare, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the UPC’s Maritime Engineering Laboratory, has been awarded a Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation to study how episodes of heavy swell, caused by climate change and rising sea levels, can affect seaside promenades.
Dec 31, 2023
The promenades along the Catalan and East Spain’s coast are rigid structures built at the end of sandy beaches, particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme waves caused by climate change. As such, they are increasingly exposed to potential flooding and extreme weather phenomena.
"Seaside promenades were designed in a completely different scenario from the current one. Today, with climate change, storms like Gloria will be more frequent and intense. We need a tool that allows us to anticipate the consequences of these overtoppings, namely the volume of water that passes over a coastal structure and can endanger, for example, people and properties," explains Corrado Altomare, a Ramón y Cajal researcher of the Maritime Engineering Laboratory (LIM/UPC) at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) and a professor at the Barcelona School of Civil Engineering (ETSECCPB).
This is the aim of OVERPROET (Semi-empirical model of wave OVERtopping of seafront PROmenades with Emergent Toe), the research project presented by Altomare for which he has been awarded a Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation. For 18 months, he will study how episodes of heavy swell can affect seaside promenades and will develop prediction models for overtopping in different climate scenarios to increase infrastructure safety and reduce potential risks to people.
Wave flume experiments
"Our promenades are mostly concrete structures with a beach at their base. These are very complex systems and it is necessary to study how they behave under different scenarios, including extreme events," explains Altomare. To conduct this study, physical laboratory tests will be first performed in the Maritime Research and Experimentation Wave Flume (CIEM), an infrastructure of the Maritime Engineering Laboratory that is part of the Maritime Aggregated Research Hydraulic Infrastructures (MARHIS) of the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
According to the researcher, the experiments will be based on real cases: "The tests will be carried out in the wave flume with a geometry similar to a promenade on the Catalan coast." These experimental results will be combined with numerical simulations using the DualSPHysics particle model, allowing the results to be adapted to different scenarios, "to cover the range of cases that may occur on the Spanish coast," he adds. Finally, advanced polynomial regression techniques will be used to develop semi-empirical formulations for calculating wave overtopping for these types of structures.
This will fill a significant gap in the state of the art in this field. So far, no models have been developed to study and predict the consequences of extreme weather phenomena on these constructions.
Rising sea levels, one of the effects of climate change sum
The seas and oceans absorb most of the excess heat from global warming. In recent decades sea level rise has accelerated due to greater melting in the polar regions of the planet. The latest data from the World Meteorological Organization show that global mean sea level reached a new record high in 2021, rising an average of 4.5 millimetres per year over the period 2013-2021.
Prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate warns that, by 2100, sea level could rise by approximately 30-60 cm, even despite achieving a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and maintaining global warming well below 2°C. If emissions continue to increase significantly, the rise in sea levels could range from 60 cm to 110 cm.
A study led by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC) recently warned that the rate of sea level rise in Spain has doubled in the last 20 years: while the increase was 1.6 millimetres per year from 1948 to 2019, the rate of increase since 2019 is 2.8—almost double.