The Current Use and Limitations of Water Related Digital Twins

a Practical View on Urban Climate Change Adaptation

authored by

Markus Groth, Steffen Bender, Thea Wübbelmann

Abstract

Currently urban areas have to face many challenges. Overall, urbanization, demographic change, digitalization and climate change are main drivers that may directly or indirectly have an impact on the lifestyle and well-being of city dwellers. All drivers are interconnected and together with other sector-relevant drivers they form a complex network, that is often difficult to understand at first glance, and has many points of friction between different interests. For example, a growing urban population needs more space for housing areas which increases sealed surfaces and reduces natural groundwater recharge. Due to climate change, temperatures are rising (especially over sealed surfaces), also leading to an increasing water demand and rising evaporation rates. Both factors, besides others, influence the natural water cycle. In addition, in many places summer becomes drier, while more precipitation falls in winter times. The number and intensity of heavy rainfall events increases and dry periods are becoming longer. On the supply side, higher demand peaks in summer already pose greater challenges to water suppliers. Heavy rainfall can for example flood facility sites, parts of the critical infrastructure or cause power outages, which can lead to systemic interuptions.

In recent years, also a trend towards “smart cities” can be seen to improve the the quality of life for residents. The idea of the progressing digitalization is to transfer parts of the real word into virtual representatives. Some are referred to as digital twins. However, these digital twins differ in their technical structure, complexity, and target for which they were developed. For years, many city administrations partly already use hydrological or urban climatological models as one form of simplified digital twins.

Against this background, the paper presents and discusses the practical use, main results and lessons learned from case studies using two different hydrological models as digital twins in two German cities. Overall, the experiences from these case studies show that also the use of simplified digital models of a city – or parts of a city – without the need for big-data and monitoring information can be good planning tools to assess plausible results regarding possible future impacts based on climate change on a small scale. However, hydrological models currently are focussing on one or two challenges, only. But, due to the complexity of natural systems with a high number of connected processes, the whole story with interacting multiple drivers is not included totally. Depending on the modelling approach used, it is therefore possible to obtain different results with different models. Therefore, a better combination of several of such digital twins or the development of more powerful tools will be necessary, for example to transform an urban area towards being climate resilient and sustainable.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology

External Organisation(s)

Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon GmbH

Type

Conference contribution

Publication date

2024

Publication status

Published

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG 13 - Climate Action

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.48494/REALCORP2024.9023 (Access: Open)