With the increase in extreme heavy rainfall events, the risk of local flooding in towns and villages is rising.
To better prepare municipalities in Hesse for such events, I developed a comprehensive data basis for flow path maps as part of the project KLIMPRAX – Heavy Rainfall, commissioned by the Climate Change and Adaptation Competence Center (FZK) of the Hessian Agency for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology (HLNUG).
For each municipality in Hesse, an individual data package was created, forming the basis for the HLNUG’s flow path maps and heavy rainfall viewer. The generated data products include flow paths and directions on agricultural land, as well as hazard classes for buildings and agricultural areas.
Input data included the Digital Terrain Model of Hesse with a 1 m resolution, land use data from the Official Real Estate Cadastre Information System (ALKIS), and building location and outline data from the Official Topographic-Cartographic Information System (ATKIS). To handle the enormous data volume (> 20 billion elevation values and 6 million building and agricultural geometries) and the heterogeneity of various raster and vector data formats for all 426 municipalities in Hesse, I developed an automated data processing pipeline. This setup ensured fully reproducible, scalable, and efficient processing of the statewide datasets and significantly reduced manual effort.
In this way, a consistent, high-quality data foundation was created across the entire state — an important contribution to municipal heavy rainfall preparedness in Hesse.