Pluvial floods in urban areas as a consequence of local heavy rain events have caused significant damage in recent years. These floods are often induced by a failure of the urban sewage system and will gain importance due to an expected increase in extreme weather events.

The local extend of heavy rain events and the very short response times of urban drainage systems are still major challenges for forecasting systems with preferably long lead times.

Within the EVUS project such a pluvial flood forecasting system will be developed for the city of Hannover. The forecasting system will be realized by linking precipitation forecasts, with streamflow and run-off-models on the surface and subsurface level as well as a model for rapid damage estimation.

In the first part of the project physical models will be used to model flow conditions and run-off on the surface and subsurface level. With these physical models an ensemble of scenarios will be calculated and transferred into a so called meta-model. The short computation time of the meta-model will then be used for a real-time prediction of pluvial floods.

The section 5.4 “Hydrology” of the GFZ is responsible for the subproject “Risk quantification and identification of critical locations” which includes two main research topics:

• Development and validation of a probabilistic multi-parameter model for residential building damage with empirical data.

• Linking the developed damage model with the urban water flow model and the meta-model for the identification of risk hot-spots and a rapid damage quantification

EVUS is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project started in June 2015 with a duration of 3 years.

The project is coordinated by Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Environmental Physics in Civil Engineering (ISU) of the Leipniz Universität Hannover (LUH). Other project partners are the Institute of Water Resources Management, Hydrology and Agricultural Hydraulic Engineering (WAWI), the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics of the LUH, the Institut für technisch-wissenschaftliche Hydrologie GmbH (ITWH), the IP SYSCON GmbH and the Hannover urban drainage service as associated partner.