Search Results
Modelling flood damages under climate change conditions-a case study for Germany
2014, Hattermann, F.F., Huang, S., Burghoff, O., Willems, W., Österle, H., Büchner, M., Kundzewicz, Z.
The aim of the study is to analyze and discuss possible climate change impacts on flood damages in Germany. The study was initiated and supported by the German insurance sector whereby the main goal was to identify general climate-related trends in flood hazard and damages and to explore sensitivity of results to climate scenario uncertainty. The study makes use of climate scenarios regionalized for the main river basins in Germany. A hydrological model (SWIM) that had been calibrated and validated for the main river gauges, was applied to transform these scenarios into discharge for more than 5000 river reaches. Extreme value distribution has been fitted to the time series of river discharge to derive the flood frequency statistics. The hydrological results for each river reach have been linked using the flood statistics to related damage functions provided by the German Insurance Association, considering damages on buildings and small enterprises. The result is that, under the specific scenario conditions, a considerable increase in flood related losses can be expected in Germany in future, warmer, climate.
Brief Communication: An update of the article "modelling flood damages under climate change conditions-a case study for Germany"
2016, Fokko Hattermann, F., Huang, S., Burghoff, O., Hoffmann, P., Kundzewicz, Z.W.
About the influence of elevation model quality and small-scale damage functions on flood damage estimation
2011, Boettle, M., Kropp, J.P., Reiber, L., Roithmeier, O., Rybski, D., Walther, C.
The assessment of coastal flood risks in a particular region requires the estimation of typical damages caused by storm surges of certain characteristics and annualities. Although the damage depends on a multitude of factors, including flow velocity, duration of flood, precaution, etc., the relationship between flood events and the corresponding average damages is usually described by a stage-damage function, which considers the maximum water level as the only damage influencing factor. Starting with different (microscale) building damage functions we elaborate a macroscopic damage function for the entire case study area Kalundborg (Denmark) on the basis of multiple coarse-graining methods and assumptions of the hydrological connectivity. We find that for small events, the macroscopic damage function mostly depends on the properties of the elevation model, while for large events it strongly depends on the assumed building damage function. In general, the damage in the case study increases exponentially up to a certain level and then less steep.