Forecasting medium-range flood hazard on European scale

Abstract

The European Flood Alert System (EFAS) prototype has been running pre-operationally for all of Europe since 2005. EFAS is now providing 3–10 day probabilistic hydrological forecasts for 22 national hydrological services. Recently, the forecasts were also made accessible in real time to the EFAS partners via an interactive password-protected web-based information system (EFAS-IS). This article gives a short overview of EFAS and illustrates the communication tools that are used in this early warning system, and that were developed in close collaboration with the hydrological national services forming part of the EFAS network. Furthermore, some results of a long-term skill assessment are presented, which underline the positive aspects of using probabilistic forecasts for mid-range flood forecasts.

Keywords:

• flood forecasting
• early warning
• probabilistic
• communication
• skill assessment

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of all staff of the JRC's Floods action and LMU/IT support. We would like to thank all colleagues that contributed to the development of the EFAS system, in particular the project leader A. de Roo, J.v.d. Knijff for model development, S. Gentilini, M. del Medico, and D. Muraro and for system development, B. Pannemans, L. Feyen, P. Salamon, J. Szabo and J. Younis for model calibration, K. Bodis for GIS support, S. Niemeyer, G. Laguardia and J. Kucera for their work on the base maps, K. Bogner and M.H. Ramos for discussion on probabilistic flood forecasting, and N. McCormick for collection of Europe Media Monitoring (EMM) information, as well as all other staff of the Floods action that support the EFAS activity through forecasting or other tasks. Further, we would like to thank the countries of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary for providing detached National Experts to support EFAS actively. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) and the German national service (DWD), the GRDC and the JRC's Institute for Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC) are thanked for providing historic and real-time data for this EFAS study. The IPSC is also thanked for providing access to EMM. The EFAS partners are thanked for their feedback and support to the activity. The authors thank the European Parliament, DG Environment and DG Enterprise for their financial support.