ALBERT

Description: Flood losses have steadily increased in the past and are expected to grow even further owing to climate and socioeconomic change. The reduction of flood vulnerability, for example, through adaptation, plays a key role in the mitigation of future flood risk. However, lacking knowledge about vulnerability dynamics, which arise from the interaction between floods and the ensuing response by society, limits the scope of current risk projections. We present a socio-hydrological method for flood risk assessment that simulates the interaction between society and flooding continuously, including changes in vulnerability through collective (structural) and private (non structural) measures. Our probabilistic approach quantifies uncertainties and exploits empirical data to chart risk dynamics including how society copes with flooding. In a case study for the commercial sector in Dresden, Germany, we show that increased adaptation is necessary to counteract the expected four-fold growth in flood risk due to transient hydroclimatic and socioeconomic boundary conditions. We further use our holistic approach to identify solutions for effective long-term adaptation, demonstrating that integrated adaptation strategies (i.e., combined structural and non structural measures) can reduce the average risk by up to 60% at the study site. Ultimately, our case study highlights the benefit of the model for robust flood risk assessment as it can capture unintended, adverse feedbacks of adaptation measures such as the levee effect. Consequently, our socio-hydrological method contributes to a more systemic and reliable flood risk assessment that can inform adaptation planning by exploring the possible system evolutions comprehensively including unlikely futures.

Description: The machine learning algorithm ‘random forest’ has been applied in many areas of water resources research including discharge simulation. Due to low setup and operation cost, random forest could represent an alternative approach to physical and conceptual hydrological models for large-scale hazard assessment in multiple catchments. Yet, the applicability of random forest to flood discharge simulation requires further exploration, especially with respect to heterogeneous catchments and daily temporal resolution. In this study, we simulate flood event and peak discharge on a daily time scale for 95 study basins in Canada and the USA. We comparatively evaluate the predictive performance of random forest against the conceptual hydrological modeling package ‘hydromad’ and assess the influence of catchment characteristics on model performance. Our analysis showed that random forest is competitive to hydromad in the simulation of low and medium flood magnitudes. However, both models exhibit inaccuracies for higher flood events. Relating catchment characteristics to model skill, we found that primarily climatic conditions and elevation affect the flood simulation capability. We conclude that random forest provides a low-cost and, yet, competitive alternative to conventional rainfall-runoff models in large-scale flood discharge simulation. Nevertheless, without further model advancements, the presented models only provide robust discharge predictions for small and medium magnitude floods in low altitude catchments with warm temperate climate.

Description: Socio-hydrological flood risk models describe the temporal co-evolution of coupled human–flood systems. However, most models oversimplify the flood loss processes and do not consider companies’ substantial contribution to total losses. This work presents a socio-hydrological flood risk model for companies that focuses on changes in vulnerability. In addition, we augment the socio-hydrological model with a process-oriented, sector-specific loss model in order to capture damage processes more realistically. In a case study, we simulate the historical flood risk dynamics of companies in the floodplain of Dresden, Germany, over the course of 120 years. Our analysis suggests that the companies in Dresden increase their exposure more cautiously than private households and decrease their vulnerability more actively through private precaution. The augmentation, consisting of informative predictors, a refined probabilistic model, and the incorporation of additional data, improves the accuracy and reliability of the flood loss estimates and reduces their uncertainty.

Description: Extreme precipitation is a weather phenomenon with tremendous damaging potential for property and human life. As the intensity and frequency of such events is projected to increase in a warming climate, there is an urgent need to advance the existing knowledge on extreme precipitation processes, statistics and impacts across scales. To this end, a working group within the Germany-based project, ClimXtreme, has been established to carry out multidisciplinary analyses of high-impact events. In this work, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the 29 June 2017 heavy precipitation event (HPE) affecting the Berlin metropolitan region (Germany), from the meteorological, impacts and climate perspectives, including climate change attribution. Our analysis showed that this event occurred under the influence of a mid-tropospheric trough over western Europe and two shortwave surface lows over Britain and Poland (Rasmund and Rasmund II), inducing relevant low-level wind convergence along the German–Polish border. Over 11 000 convective cells were triggered, starting early morning 29 June, displacing northwards slowly under the influence of a weak tropospheric flow (10 m s−1 at 500 hPa). The quasi-stationary situation led to totals up to 196 mm d−1, making this event the 29 June most severe in the 1951–2021 climatology, ranked by means of a precipitation-based index. Regarding impacts, it incurred the largest insured losses in the period 2002 to 2017 (EUR 60 million) in the greater Berlin area. We provide further insights on flood attributes (inundation, depth, duration) based on a unique household-level survey data set. The major moisture source for this event was the Alpine–Slovenian region (63 % of identified sources) due to recycling of precipitation falling over that region 1 d earlier. Implementing three different generalised extreme value (GEV) models, we quantified the return periods for this case to be above 100 years for daily aggregated precipitation, and up to 100 and 10 years for 8 and 1 h aggregations, respectively. The conditional attribution demonstrated that warming since the pre-industrial era caused a small but significant increase of 4 % in total precipitation and 10 % for extreme intensities. The possibility that not just greenhouse-gas-induced warming, but also anthropogenic aerosols affected the intensity of precipitation is investigated through aerosol sensitivity experiments. Our multi-disciplinary approach allowed us to relate interconnected aspects of extreme precipitation. For instance, the link between the unique meteorological conditions of this case and its very large return periods, or the extent to which it is attributable to already-observed anthropogenic climate change.

Description: River flooding is a constant peril for societies, causing direct economic losses in the order of $100 billion worldwide each year. Under global change, the prolonged concentration of people and assets in floodplains is accompanied by an emerging intensification of flood extremes due to anthropogenic global warming, ultimately exacerbating flood risk in many regions of the world. Flood adaptation plays a key role in the mitigation of impacts, but poor understanding of vulnerability and its dynamics limits the validity of predominant risk assessment methods and impedes effective adaptation strategies. Therefore, this thesis investigates new methods for flood risk assessment that embrace the complexity of flood vulnerability, using the understudied commercial sector as an application example. Despite its importance for accurate risk evaluation, flood loss modeling has been based on univariable and deterministic stage-damage functions for a long time. However, such simplistic methods only insufficiently describe the large variation in damage processes, which initiated the development of multivariable and probabilistic loss estimation techniques. The first study of this thesis developed flood loss models for companies that are based on emerging statistical and machine learning approaches (i.e., random forest, Bayesian network, Bayesian regression). In a benchmarking experiment on basis of object-level loss survey data, the study showed that all proposed models reproduced the heterogeneity in damage processes and outperformed conventional stage-damage functions with respect to predictive accuracy. Another advantage of the novel methods is that they convey probabilistic information in predictions, which communicates the large remaining uncertainties transparently and, hence, supports well-informed risk assessment. Flood risk assessment combines vulnerability assessment (e.g., loss estimation) with hazard and exposure analyses. Although all of the three risk drivers interact and change over time, such dependencies and dynamics are usually not explicitly included in flood risk models. Recently, systemic risk assessment that dissolves the isolated consideration of risk drivers has gained traction, but the move to holistic risk assessment comes with limited thoroughness in terms of loss estimation and data limitations. In the second study, I augmented a socio-hydrological system dynamics model for companies in Dresden, Germany, with the multivariable Bayesian regression loss model from the first study. The additional process-detail and calibration data improved the loss estimation in the systemic risk assessment framework and contributed to more accurate and reliable simulations. The model uses Bayesian inference to quantify uncertainty and learn the model parameters from a combination of prior knowledge and diverse data. The third study demonstrates the potential of the socio-hydrological flood risk model for continuous, long-term risk assessment and management. Using hydroclimatic ad socioeconomic forcing data, I projected a wide range of possible risk trajectories until the end of the century, taking into account the adaptive behavior of companies. The study results underline the necessity of increased adaptation efforts to counteract the expected intensification of flood risk due to climate change. A sensitivity analysis of the effectiveness of different adaptation measures and strategies revealed that optimized adaptation has the potential to mitigate flood risk by up to 60%, particularly when combining structural and non-structural measures. Additionally, the application shows that systemic risk assessment is capable of capturing adverse long-term feedbacks in the human-flood system such as the levee effect. Overall, this thesis advances the representation of vulnerability in flood risk modeling by offering modeling solutions that embrace the complexity of human-flood interactions and quantify uncertainties consistently using probabilistic modeling. The studies show how scarce information in data and previous experiments can be integrated in the inference process to provide model predictions and simulations that are reliable and rich in information. Finally, the focus on the flood vulnerability of companies provides new insights into the heterogeneous damage processes and distinct flood coping of this sector.

Description: Flussüberschwemmungen sind eine ständige Gefahr für die Gesellschaft und verursachen jedes Jahr weltweit wirtschaftliche Schäden in der Größenordnung von 100 Milliarden US-Dollar. Im Zuge des globalen Wandels erhöht sich die Konzentration von Menschen und Vermögenswerten in Überschwemmungsgebieten kontinuierlich, während der menschengemachte Klimawandel Hochwasserextreme verstärkt. Die Überlagerung dieser Prozesse führt zu einer Verschärfung des Hochwasserrisikos in vielen Weltregionen. Der Hochwasseranapassung kommt dabei eine Schlüsselrolle bei der Abschwächung von Schäden zu. Allerdings ist das Verständnis von Hochwasservulnerabilität (d.h., Anfälligkeit gegenüber Schäden) und damit verbundener Dynamiken noch sehr begrenzt, was die Risikoabschätzung und die Entwicklung von Anpassungsstrategien erschwert. In dieser kumulativen Dissertation werden anhand von drei Studien neue Methoden zur Hochwasserrisikoabschätzung für den gewerblichen Sektor vorgestellt, der in der Vergangenheit wenig untersucht wurde. Die erste Studie präsentiert Hochwasserschadensmodelle die auf statistischen Methoden und maschinellem Lernen basieren und eine Vielzahl von Einflussfaktoren berücksichtigen. In Verbindung mit probabilistischen Vorhersagen führt dies zu einer Verbesserung der Modellgenauigkeit und -verlässlichkeit. Anschließend wird in einer Pilotstudie für Dresden, Deutschland, eines der neuen Schadensmodelle in ein ganzheitliches systemdynamisches Modell integriert, um Veränderungen in Hochwasservulnerabilität und -risiko kontinuierlich zu simulieren. Die Methode integriert zusätzliche Prozessdetails und Kalibrierungsdaten in das Modell und verbessert so die Simulationsleistung. Schließlich werden mit dem systemdynamischen Modell in der dritten Studie langfristige Projektionsläufe durchgeführt, um die Entwicklung des Hochwasserrisikos bis zum Ende des Jahrhunderts abzuschätzen. Die Ergebnisse der Studie unterstreichen das Potential von Hochwasseranpassung - insbesondere in Zeiten des Klimawandels - und demonstrieren die Fähigkeit ganzheitlicher Modellierungsansätze, ungünstige Entwicklungen des Risikos frühzeitig aufzudecken. Insgesamt verbessert diese Arbeit die Darstellung der Vulnerabilität in der Hochwasserrisikoabschätzung, indem sie Modellierungslösungen anbietet, die der Komplexität der Wechselwirkungen zwischen Mensch und Hochwasser gerecht werden und Unsicherheiten konsequent quantifizieren.

Description: Flood losses have steadily increased in the past and are expected to grow even further owing to climate and socioeconomic change. The reduction of flood vulnerability, for example, through adaptation, plays a key role in the mitigation of future flood risk. However, lacking knowledge about vulnerability dynamics, which arise from the interaction between floods and the ensuing response by society, limits the scope of current risk projections. We present a socio-hydrological method for flood risk assessment that simulates the interaction between society and flooding continuously, including changes in vulnerability through collective (structural) and private (non structural) measures. Our probabilistic approach quantifies uncertainties and exploits empirical data to chart risk dynamics including how society copes with flooding. In a case study for the commercial sector in Dresden, Germany, we show that increased adaptation is necessary to counteract the expected four-fold growth in flood risk due to transient hydroclimatic and socioeconomic boundary conditions. We further use our holistic approach to identify solutions for effective long-term adaptation, demonstrating that integrated adaptation strategies (i.e., combined structural and non structural measures) can reduce the average risk by up to 60% at the study site. Ultimately, our case study highlights the benefit of the model for robust flood risk assessment as it can capture unintended, adverse feedbacks of adaptation measures such as the levee effect. Consequently, our socio-hydrological method contributes to a more systemic and reliable flood risk assessment that can inform adaptation planning by exploring the possible system evolutions comprehensively including unlikely futures.