Norman Ettrich

• Traditional methods fail for the purpose of simulating the complete flow process in urban areas as a consequence of heavy rainfall and as required by the European Standard EN-752 since the bi-directional coupling between sewer and surface is not properly handled. The methodology, developed in the BMBF/ EUREKA-project RisUrSim, solves this problem by carrying out the runoff on the basis of shallow water equations solved on high-resolution surface grids. Exchange nodes between the sewer and the surface, like inlets and manholes, are located in the computational grid and water leaving the sewer in case of surcharge is further distributed on the surface. So far, it has been a problem to get the dense topographical information needed to build models suitable for hydrodynamic runoff calculation in urban areas. Recent airborne data collection methods like laser scanning, however, offer a great chance to economically gather densely sampled input data. This paper studies the potential of such laser-scan data sets for urban water hydrodynamics.