Elbe river flood and draught scenarios - the MOSES and Digital Earth initiatives
Numerous research institutes are active in climate research by modeling and analyzing climate scenarios within their fields of expertise. Climate change, however, acts across many compartments of the earh system and thus requires an integrated approach across earth science disciplines. The integration of climate-relevant variables across earth compartments has been improved over the last decades allowing validated predictions for global or large scale climate scenarios today. However, ongoing research and climate reality show that global scale climate changes increasingly also trigger local climate changes and enhance extreme weather events. Although their occurrence is (still) not predictable, extreme weathers may affect the region of occurrence tremendously and can come with a great potential of causing disasters including effects on geomorphology, vegetation, rivers, as well as infrastructure (e. g., cities, roads, railroads) which can be damaged by extreme weather events. Both MOSES and Digital Earth focus on the Elbe river system use case that addresses floods and draughts within climate change. Performing test campaigns in the entire Elbe system, the eight Helmholtz Centres of the Sector Earth and Environment of BMBF are currently clustering their expertise within the framework of MOSES and Digital Earth to establish a Modular and Mobile Sensor Network. MOSES will measure short, medium, and long term effects of floods and draughts in the river Elbe, and Digital Earth will process and model the data in real-time. Both projects combine their outstanding expertise including the necessary data integration and processing steps across scientific disciplines and will provide the required IT-expertise and infrastructure to ensure the seamless data flow from the sensor network to real-time analysis and visualization. This includes the automatization of access to data from very diverse sources, related validation and transformation processes, as well as the installation of further processing and/or analyzing routines. It comprises of a mixture of powerful hardware, automatization scripts, and applications to administer all of it. Here we will focus on the Sensor Network and the IT infrastructure part (Digital Earth WP1, WP2) showing O2A, AWI's data flow framework that covers all infrastructure units from observation, via analysis and visualization to archive (SENOR.AWI.DE, DASHOARD.AWI.DE, MAPS.AWI.DE, DATA.AWI.DE, PANGAEA.DE)