  Accurate information on waves and storm surges is essential to understand
coastal hazards that are expected to increase in view of global warming and
rising sea levels. Despite the recent advancement in development and
application of large-scale coastal models, nearshore processes are still not
sufficiently resolved due to coarse resolutions, transferring errors to coastal
risk assessments and other large-scale applications. Here we developed a
50-year hindcast of waves and storm surges on an unstructured mesh of >650,000
nodes with an unprecedented resolution of 2-4 km at the global coast. Our
modelling system is based on the circulation model SCHISM that is fully coupled
with the WWM-V (WindWaveModel) and is forced by surface winds, pressure, and
ice coverage from the ERA5 reanalysis. Results are compared with observations
from satellite altimeters, tidal gauges and buoys, and show good skill for both
Sea Surface Height (SSH) and Significant Wave Height (Hs), and a much-improved
ability to reproduce the nearshore dynamics compared with previous,
lower-resolution studies. Besides SSH, the modelling system also produces a
range of other wave-related fields at each node of the mesh with a time step of
3 hours, including the spectral parameters of the first three largest energy
peaks. This dataset offers the potential for more accurate global-scale
applications on coastal hazard and risk
