Sea level projections portal for communicating impacts to policymakers

Small island developing states are particularly at risk from extreme water levels and coastal erosion. Policy makers require information to support decision making on how to improve resilience and adapt to future changes. Here we present a web portal designed to display different sea level projections across the Caribbean Sea, developed as part of our contribution to the UK Government’s Commonwealth Marine Economies (CME) programme and the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s ACCORD programme.

The portal has been designed using free and open-source software, and is self-contained, allowing it to be deployed on local partner websites with minimal effort. The responsive design allows the portal to work as well on as it does on PCs.

Currently the portal displays projected sea level for over 50 locations across the Caribbean, along with sea level data available at the site, but extra sites can be added easily. Quality controlled data has been used where possible; where this is not available, we have used automated software developed earlier in the CME programme to perform basic quality control.

Similarly, the portal provides projections from four sea level scenarios based on earlier National Oceanography Centre work, but other projections can be added by updating configuration files.

The portal can be accessed at https://psmsl.org/accord/projections.html