The ClimEx project is the result of an international cooperation between research institutes, universities and state offices for water management in Bavaria and Québec. The aim of the project is to investigate the effects of climate change on extreme meteorological and hydrological events and their consequences for both states. Within the framework of the collaboration, possible scenarios of climate change between the years 1950 and 2099 were calculated and the data simulated with the help of the SuperMUC at the Leibniz Computing Centre.

At the Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation, the result data from three different 60-hour time windows were processed in such a way that the information contained therein could be presented in a clear and easily understandable way. Each of the three sections contains a heavy rain event, which is visualized in a computer-generated three-dimensional space. The first time window represents the precipitation that preceded the Whitsun flood of 1999. This event, which is based on historical meteorological data from 1999, serves as a comparative value for the two simulated events of the years 2060 and 2081.

To illustrate the data set, the VR application includes a model of Bavaria, which was created using the Digital Terrain Model of the Bavarian Surveying Authority and textured with satellite images from Sentinel-2. The V2C has added name tags for the most populous cities to the map to make it easier to identify endangered urban centers.

The visualization provides an easy-to-understand representation of the extent of a key consequence of climate change for laypersons and experts alike.

(Scientific paper)