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Abstract
The quality control, validation and verification of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) are described. EFAS is designed as a flood early warning system at pan-European scale, to complement national systems and provide flood warnings more than 2 days before a flood. On average 20–30 alerts per year are sent out to the EFAS partner network which consists of 24 National hydrological authorities responsible for transnational river basins. Quality control of the system includes the evaluation of the hits, misses and false alarms, showing that EFAS has more than 50% of the time hits. Furthermore, the skills of both the meteorological as well as the hydrological forecasts are evaluated, and are included here for a 10-year period. Next, end-user needs and feedback are systematically analysed. Suggested improvements, such as real-time river discharge updating, are currently implemented.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this work have been done within the scope of the EC-funded PREVIEW (http://www.preview-risk.com) and SAFER projects (http://www.emergencyresponse.eu), with some early developments as part of the DG-RTD funded EFFS project. EFAS has been mainly developed with core-funding from the JRC, complemented with additional funding from EU bodies (DG Environment, European Parliament, IDABC programme). The Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) in Koblenz collaborates with the real-time discharge collection. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) finances research on communication and perception of flood forecasting uncertainty within the context of EFAS. All national and regional hydrological authorities, which are members of the EFAS network, are greatly acknowledged for their collaboration, feedback and support of the system. Last but not least, the EFAS development team is much larger than the co-authors to this paper. The entire EFAS team is greatly acknowledged for their technical contributions, their science, but above all for their enthusiasm to the system.