Hamburg is known as a green city by the water. The Elbe, Alster, and countless other small rivers and canals run through the city. As heavy rainfall events become more frequent and thus the risk of flooding increases significantly, metropolitan areas such as Hamburg must be prepared for extreme weather events.
An essential foundation for effective disaster management is provided by heavy rainfall hazard maps, which can be used to define risk zones in advance and develop protective measures based on these maps. To create these maps, which incorporate a large number of different data and parameters, complex hydrodynamic simulations are necessary. To realize these, the simulation software viscloud is the tool of choice: faster than any other software solution on the market, viscloud is able to analyze both large regions and highly complex water structures - such as Hamburg's widely spread canal network - in detail with regard to flood risk.
Alongside existing collaborations with German federal states such as Rhineland-Palatinate and major cities such as Cologne, Hamburg Wasser has joined forces with VRVis through the COMET-funded Raincloud project in fall 2021. Due to Hamburg's especially complex water structures, there are many challenges to overcome in order to provide a reliable simulation of heavy rainfall and flooding scenarios for the entire city.
Consequently, the researchers of our Integrated Simulations Group are working in close collaboration with our partners at Hamburg Wasser to adapt viscloud for this specific use case making fast and, as usual, easy-to-understand simulations and visualizations of flood hazards possible.
The main focus of the research collaboration is:
Vienna, June 8, 2022
The Raincloud project's goal is to optimize and extend the simulation software viscloud to tackle the increasing challenges in water planning and disaster management in the face of climate change.
The certification of the project partner DAHLEM by the state of Baden-Württemberg shows the high technical quality standard of the simulation software Visdom used for heavy rain hazard maps.
The flood simulation tool Visdom is the basis of special flood protection management plans for the Thaya region for a total area of more than 2,600 square kilometers.
The goal of HORA 3D is the development and maintenance of a publicly accessible web application for object-related visualization of the results of the HORA 3 research project.
viscloud's hydrodynamic simulations provide precise water level predictions at any point on a water surface in the "PegelAlarm" app.
We create a digital twin of a community and simulate weather events to identify high-risk buildings and infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Practical flood management with decision software viscloud.
Heavy rainfall events are increasing throughout Europe. In the EU project RAINMAN, VRVis has developed an interactive viscloud model to visualize the course and consequences of possible flood scenarios caused by heavy rainfall for the city of Graz.
The HORA 3 project focuses on flood modelling for all rivers and streams in Austria. The results are detailed flood risk maps for different annual periods.
