VULNERABILITY OF THE BANGLADESH COASTLINE TO INUNDATION UNDER CYCLONE ACTIVITY: PAST RECORDS AND DRR STRATEGIES AT SANDWIP ISLAND

The work of the RISC-KIT Project aims at demonstrating a high quality, high resolution end-to-end Early Warning System (EWS) over the case study area, Sandwip Island (Bangladesh). This project is implemented in twinning partnership with the Coastal Inundation Forecasting Demonstration Project for Bangladesh (CIFDP-B) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which is developing coastal inundation forecasting and warning system for the entire Bangladeshi coast, to be operated by the Government of Bangladesh.In order to understand the local evolution of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) strategies for coastal flooding, as well as to assess its efficiency at all scales from national to local, an extensive review of historical events was firstly conducted. Out of 73 major coastal flooding events recorded since 1795, a selection of 37 of these (1960-2013) was archived into a repository, which includes the detailed event characteristics as well as the impacts. A focused review of the DRR strategies was also conducted through a consultative process with the national authorities as well as with the end users and local residents in the case study area.During the lifetime of the Project, an end-to-end EWS will be built in the case study site, with a suite of models linked to the operational Coastal Inundation Forecasting (CIF) model that runs for the whole Bangladeshi coast at a coarse resolution. The high-resolution EWS being developed by RISC-KIT comprises the Delft3D tidal model adapted to the Bay of Bengal, in view of future studies for tidal prediction of higher resolution and quality. In order (i) to validate the tidal model, (ii) to study the local tide and (ii) to compare the tidal signal with the Chittagong GLOSS one, a tide gauge was temporarily installed on the East coast of Sandwip Island.