TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sieg, Tobias
A1  - Thieken, Annegret
T1  - Improving flood impact estimations
JF  - Environmental research letters
N2  - A reliable estimation of flood impacts enables meaningful flood risk management and rapid assessments of flood impacts shortly after a flood. The flood in 2021 in Central Europe and the analysis of its impacts revealed that these estimations are still inadequate. Therefore, we investigate the influence of different data sets and methods aiming to improve flood impact estimates. We estimated economic flood impacts to private households and companies for a flood event in 2013 in Germany using (a) two different flood maps, (b) two approaches to map exposed objects based on OpenStreetMap and the Basic European Asset Map, (c) two different approaches to estimate asset values, and (d) tree-based models and Stage-Damage-Functions to describe the vulnerability. At the macro scale, water masks lead to reasonable impact estimations. At the micro and meso-scale, the identification of affected objects by means of water masks is insufficient leading to unreliable estimations. The choice of exposure data sets is most influential on the estimations. We find that reliable impact estimations are feasible with reported numbers of flood-affected objects from the municipalities. We conclude that more effort should be put in the investigation of different exposure data sets and the estimation of asset values. Furthermore, we recommend the establishment of a reporting system in the municipalities for a fast identification of flood-affected objects shortly after an event.
KW  - rapid impact assessment
KW  - floods
KW  - OpenStreetMap
KW  - flood risk management
KW  - natural hazards
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6d6c
SN  - 1748-9326
VL  - 17
IS  - 6
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  -