Dr. Victor Malagon Santos

Research Interests

• Changes in sea levels and impacts.
• Flood risk.
• Numerical and statistical modeling of coastal processes.
• Coastal oceanography and morphodynamics.

Research at NIOZ

The research I am performing at NIOZ is part of a large collaborative project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020, the so-called PROTECT project. The overarching aim of PROTECT is to project changes in the land-based cryosphere to produce global and regional projections of sea-level rise (SLR) and assess associated impacts to support coastal adaptation planning policies. Our role in PROTECT is to investigate SLR using different statistical frameworks and outputs from state-of-the-art ice sheet and glacier models (produced within PROTECT) to design global and regional SLR projections up to 2100 and to 2500, accounting for all SLR components.

Previous Research

The focus of my PhD research was on compound flooding in coastal areas, which mainly stems from the interaction between river discharge and surge processes. The flooding drivers leading to compound flooding may or may not be extreme, but their interaction can lead to extreme societal, economical, and environmental impacts. Observed compound events are often scarce, which complicates their thorough assessment. For my PhD, I assessed the suitability of different multivariate statistical modelling approaches to assess compound flooding, examined the uncertainty introduced by scarce data, and used hydrological models to assess the along-river effects of compound flooding.

I have also been involved in other coastal research topics, such as the prediction of dune erosion under extreme events (side PhD project) and the assessment of the spatial and temporal characteristics of extreme wave events (MSc thesis).