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Coastal inundation by storm surges is one of the main risks for coastal cities worldwide. These risks are expected to further increase in the next few decades due to population growth, sea level rise and land subsidence. To assist worldwide advance warning, a global operational forecasting system with a global storm surge model is developed. The global model uses an unstructured spherical grid, to represent coastal areas in more detail (around 5 km resolution) than open oceans (50 km resolution), with in total nearly 1 million computation cells. The newly developed highly efficient Delft3D flexible mesh code produces a 10 day forecast within 30 minutes on just one 12core Intel E5 computational node. The model was calibrated and validated against about 300 coastal tide gauges and satellite altimeter. The main goals of the model are to provide boundary conditions for nested more detailed regional models and to study the impact of climate change. The Global Storm Surge Forecasting and Information System (GLOSSIS) is developed with Delft-FEWS, the proven real time data centric software infrastructure for operational water management and forecasting. The system manages all data flows, such as real-time observations and global meteorological forcing of the model, as well as scheduling model runs and visualisation of the results. Model output is produced for about 16,000 coastal segments with more or less homogeneous characteristics (DIVA). This can be compared against hundreds of real-time observations from tide-gauges worldwide, imported from the IOC sea level station monitoring facility. The system provides real-time operational water level and storm-surge forecasts in areas that currently lack any forecasting capability. Currently, the model is running 4 times a day to produce update forecasts of coastal storm surges worldwide.