Hochwassermanagement-Plattform für kleinere Städte und Kommunen mit Bürgerbeteiligung

Abstract

In urban areas the damage potential by flood events is particularly high, regularly causing damages and economic losses. Early warning systems that can forecast such events with sufficient lead time are therefore very important. However, especially for small catchment areas the establishment and operation of forecasting systems is very difficult. On the one hand early warning systems have to deal with high spatial uncertainties of precipitation forecasts, on the other hand small catchments often show very fast reactions of the basin to heavy precipitation events. Moreover, in small catchments automatic gauging stations are often missing. This makes early flood forecasting complicated and very challenging. This paper presents a software platform for the flood management particularly for small river basins in German municipalities. It tries to solve the problems mentioned above via civic involvement by incorporating Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). For this purpose, volunteers (citizens, municipal employees) are asked to acquire relevant hydrological and meteorological data via a smartphone application in order to compensate for the lack of official gauging stations. This includes e.g. water level measurements acquired via mobile image-based measurement methods. The information captured by volunteers is – in addition to open publicly available forecasting data provided by the German Meteorological Service Provider –automatically incorporated into the forecasting system in order to minimize forecasting uncertainties. A web-based dashboard available to crisis managers, e.g. disaster relief forces, visually processes and displays all relevant information and forecasting data thus enabling convenient monitoring of the situation (situation awareness).