Disaster risk management: urban flooding and heatstress

Natural disasters are a growing concern around the globe. In the Netherlands, water has always played an important role as both friend and enemy. To quickly analyze and visualise possible disaster outcomes has been really difficult. In collaboration with engineering company Tauw we improved this modelling with an interdisciplinary team of GIS experts, High performance computing and real time visualisation. In a pilot for the city center of Groningen we developed a 3D version of flooding landscape maps (RUG, 2014) after modelling extreme rainfall. With a flooding landscape map you can see at a glance where water is going and where problem areas arise in case of extreme rainfall. Any municipality or county can thus quickly determine which measures are to be taken to prevent for example disruption to traffic or flooding damage to buildings.