mhwz.de

Platform Overview

This is the official cross-state flood information portal operated by the German Federal and State Water Working Alliance (LAWA). Its core public service is the free opening of a public API for flood dynamics and official flood warning data across the entire territory of Germany, helping third-party developers, media outlets and research institutions to re-distribute and utilize official flood disaster information.

Core Features and Pricing

The core value of this platform is its open standardized API. The data covers around 1,200 key hydrological stations in Germany, providing the current flood level classification, geographic information, and links to the corresponding state flood portal for each station. It also releases the geographic boundaries and classification information for official flood warnings issued by all German states, supports output in three formats: GeoJSON, JSON, and XML, and allows filtered queries by state. All APIs and data are completely free, licensed under CC BY 4.0, and only require attribution to the source when used.

Advantages and Disadvantages Analysis

Advantages

• Data comes from official German authoritative channels, with far higher reliability than unofficial data;
• The interface is open for free with a permissive license, supporting both commercial and non-commercial secondary development;
• Data is updated every minute, and the timeliness meets the requirements for disaster warning scenarios.

Disadvantages are also quite obvious:

• It only provides flood level classification information, and does not offer raw monitoring data such as specific water levels or flow rates;
• The service only covers the territory of Germany, so it has limited practical use for users outside the region;
• The platform does not guarantee the accuracy of the data, and responsibility is borne by the data provider of each respective state.

Access and Compatibility

Chinese users can directly access this website and its API documentation with no access restrictions. This platform is only targeted at developers and research institutions that need German flood data, and ordinary domestic users in China almost never have a need to use it.