How much rain seeps into the ground in the Tiergarten? How much evaporates on the Tempelhofer Feld? And what kind of volumes end up in the sewerage system at Potsdamer Platz? Berlin has put together this topic to fill you in. It combines data from the German Meteorological Service (DWD) and the Berlin Waterworks (BWB) with information collected on site. A lot more water can evaporate and percolate in a park, for example, than in a paved car park.
You need to know where water percolates and where it reforms to manage the water of a large city. The city was divided into 25,000 individual areas to track this in detail. The Berlin ABIMO water balance model was used to predict the long-term average of the rainwater’s journey for a total of five years.
Overall, almost two thirds of rainwater evaporate in Berlin. Of the remainder, two thirds seep away; the rest is fed into the sewerage system.
Berliners can also do their bit for the water balance. Green roofs, for example, promote evaporation as they catch rain before it flows into drains and ends up in the sewerage system. The influence of green roofs has also been recorded since 2017.