Ergebnisse

The water balance of urban areas can highly differ from natural areas, like forests. This deviation can be an indicator for water-related issues in urban areas, like floods, droughts and heat stress. To quantify the deviation of the water balance from a natural reference case, a new parameter ΔW was introduced to summarize the deviation of the components evaporation, surface runoff and infiltration. The open source water balance model ABIMO was further developed to simulate these three components for urban areas. ABIMO has been applied to the city of Berlin including a successful model validation for the surface runoff within the combined sewer system of Berlin. Simulations using ABIMO and computations of ΔW gave promising results for Berlin, and can be used to locate areas of high deviation in water balance as hotspots for the implementation of green and blue infrastructure. The model is openly available including R packages for its application.