FLEMO is an empirical flood damage model that was developed and validated on empirical damage data (HOWAS21 database) of German river floods for residential and commercial buildings (Thieken et al. 2008, Tapia-Silva et al., 2011, Merz et al., 2013, Schröter et al., 2015, Sieg et al., 2017, Schoppa et al., 2020). For the residential and commercial sectors, the damage functions are based on water depth as a hazard indicator. The model for the residential sector distinguishes three building types (single-family houses, semi-detached houses, multi-family houses) and two building quality levels (low/medium quality, high quality). The commercial sector is divided into four sub-sectors (manufacturing, trade, business services, public and private services) and several size classes according to the number of employees. Following the approach of Tapia-Silva et al. (2011), damage in the agricultural sector can also be estimated for different crops based on the duration of flooding and the season of flood occurrence.

Publications:

Merz, B., Kreibich, H., & Lall, U. (2013). Multi-variate flood damage assessment: A tree-based data-mining approach. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science, 13(1), 53–64. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-13-53-2013

Schröter, K., Kreibich, H., Vogel, K., Riggelsen, C., Scherbaum, F., & Merz, B. (2014). How useful are complex flood damage models? Water Resources Research, 50(4), 3378–3395. https://doi.org/10.1002/2013WR014396

Schoppa, L., Barendrecht, M., Sieg, T., Sairam, N., Kreibich, H., Archfield, S., & Kochanek, K. (2022). Augmenting a socio-hydrological flood risk model for companies with process-oriented loss estimation. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 67(11), 1623–1639. doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2022.2095207

Sieg, T., Vogel, K., Merz, B., & Kreibich, H. (2024). Tree-based flood damage modeling of companies: Damage processes and model performance. Water Resources Research, 53, 6050–6068. doi.org/10.1002/2017WR020784

Tapia-Silva, F. O., Itzerott, S., Foerster, S., Kuhlmann, B., & Kreibich, H. (2011). Estimation of flood losses to agricultural crops using remote sensing. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C, 36(7–8), 253–265. doi.org/10.1016/J.PCE.2011.03.005

Thieken, A. H., Olschewski, A., Kreibich, H., Kobsch, S., & Merz, B. (2008). Development and evaluation of FLEMOps — a new Flood Loss Estimation MOdel for the private sector. WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 118, 315–324. https://doi.org/10.2495/FRIAR080301