dr.ing. F. Tügel (Franziska)

Expertise

• Earth and Planetary Sciences

  • Flash Flood
  • Hydrodynamics
  • Shallow Water
  • Climate Change
  • Egypt
  • Water Depth
  • Germany
  • Field Experiment

Organisations

I am an Assistant Professor in Multi-scale Hydrological Assessment through Modelling and Data Integration (a joint position between ITC-GAIA and ET-MWM). I'm interested in how human activities and climate variability jointly shape water-related challenges — from flooding to drought — and how water management can be adapted to better cope with extremes across urban and rural landscapes. I use process-based hydrological, hydrodynamic, and integrated surface-groundwater modelling complemented by field measurements and remote sensing to assess the interplay between water management, hydrological processes, and their climatic drivers across scales — from local to catchment and beyond. Currently, I coordinate the ITC Soil Moisture Network, monitoring long-term soil moisture dynamics in Twente. Ultimately, I aim to contribute to sustainable water and land management solutions that address the dual challenges of "too much" and "too little" water.

Key Expertise & Background

• Pluvial flooding & mitigation: I have worked on pluvial and flash flood modelling, including rainfall-runoff modelling and city-scale (2D) and 2D-1D hydrodynamic urban flood modelling and studying flash floods in a wadi system in Egypt. 
• Climate adaptation: In the interdisciplinary project Climate and Water under Change, I collaborated with colleagues across disciplines to assess how climate change might affect urban flooding and declining lake levels, and to evaluate the effectiveness of grey and blue-green infrastructures in reducing urban flooding.
• Integrated modelling: I have contributed to studying long-term changes in groundwater recharge and lake levels using hybrid approaches that combine integrated surface-subsurface modelling, energy-balance based evaporation estimates, and machine learning. 

Research interests:

• Anthropogenic impacts on hydrological processes and water-related challenges 
• Sustainable and resilient water management (adaptive solutions, blue-green infrastructures, and nature-based solutions)
• Hydrodynamic modelling (1D/2D) for urban and rural flood assessment
• Integrated hydrological modelling focused on surface-subsurface interactions 
• Field monitoring and the management of long-term environmental sensor networks
• Integration of in-situ measurements and remote sensing data
• Hybrid approaches: Machine learning and process-based modelling

Publications

Research profiles

Affiliated study programs

Courses academic year 2026/2027

Courses in the current academic year are added at the moment they are finalised in the Osiris system. Therefore it is possible that the list is not yet complete for the whole academic year.

Courses academic year 2025/2026

Courses academic year 2024/2025

Here is a podcast episode in which my former colleagues Márk Somogyvári and Desiree Hetzel from the CliWaC project talk with me about my work on modelling urban flooding: Spotify-Link.

Further information about the Touching Water podcast: https://www.iri-thesys.org/news/just-released-toching-water-podcast/

Address

University of Twente

Langezijds (building no. 19), room 1134
Hallenweg 8
7522 NH Enschede
Netherlands

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University of Twente

Horst Complex (building no. 20), room W202
De Horst 2
7522 LW Enschede
Netherlands

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Organisations