Strong Rain and Flood Danger Mapping for Cultural Heritage Sites

In this paper we present a combined approach on estimating the endangerment of cultural heritage sites getting struck by strong rain events and flash floods. As shown in the UN Report on “Human Costs of Disasters” from 2020 [1] flood events show a far above average increase by 130 % from the decades 1980 to 1999 compared to 2000 to 2019 where most other disaster types like landslides, storms or wildfires show only an average increase of about 20 to 50 %. These insights together with the increase of flash floods originating from stationary rain in Germany caused the intensification of our research on danger analysis from strong rain events – especially for cultural heritage sites. In this paper we present different approaches deriving flood dangers, including local terrain modeling and water runoff simulation, and how to combine them to produce a concise estimation of the flood risk for cultural heritage sites, which can directly be used by the responsible authorities. The methods are applied to different cultural heritage sites in Europe, and results are discussed.