European Flood Alert System
Encyclopedia
The European Flood Alert System project is a European Commission
initiative to increase preparedness for riverine floods across Europe.
The disastrous floods in the Elbe and Danube basin in summer 2002, acted as a wake-up call for the National Authorities as well as the European Commission to investigate new strategies for flood prevention and protection, with focus on coordinated actions among countries sharing the same river basin.Shortly after the 2002 floods, the European Commission announced in the communication COM(2002)-481 the development of a European Flood Alert System (EFAS).
EFAS is part of a strategy for improved disaster management in Europe to reduce the impact of transnational floods through early warning. First of all, the aim of the system is to provide, useful, complementary and shared information on upcoming flood events to the national hydrological services. Furthermore, EFAS provides for the first time a coherent overview on ongoing and forecasted floods across Europe, which is needed for improved coordination of international civil protection actions on European scale during severe flood events.
It is being developed by the FLOODS action of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, located in Ispra, Italy. Since 2005, EFAS provides national water authorities and the European Commission with early flood warning information up to 10 days in advance. Since 2007, when the EFAS-Information System (EFAS-IS was launched, hydrological partner organisations can access the real-time flood forecasts any time and interact with the EFAS development and monitoring team. Real-time forecasts are password protected and only distributed to those organisations that have signed a specific agreement. This is to avoid that real-time flood warning information is distributed to non-experts who are not trained on the specific EFAS products. Currently the EFAS network holds 27 partner organisations. An archive of EFAS results with information older than 1 month is publicly available on the floods portal of the action.
Closely associated with EFAS are two major data collection systems. One is the European Terrestrian Network for River discharge (ETN-R) which has been launched by the European Commission to collect realtime waterlevels and discharges across Europe's transnational river basins. ETN-R is being executed by the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC), which operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation. The second project is the EU-FLOOD-GIS, a comprehensive data integration system to support the flood forecasting activity on floods in Europe. It collects meteorological and hydrological data in real-time data, including ETN-R, across Europe and also holds historic time series needed for calibration and validation of the system. Furthermore, information on cross sections, reservoirs, flood extent information, collected for specific case studies, are held in this data base. Because of the restricted data policy in Europe, EU-FLOOD-GIS data cannot be distributed. Only the associated catalogue will be made available in the future, after all data providers have agreed to this.
EFAS has been declared a testbed of the Hydrological Ensemble Prediction Experiment
(HEPEX)
instead of single (deterministic) forecasts for flood warning times beyond 48 hours. EPS have already become an integral part of operational weather forecasts over the past years. They are designed to give a measure of the predictability of the weather and uncertainty in the model solution for lead times up to two weeks which would be considered well outside the range of predictability for deterministic models. The trend for implementing hydrological ensemble prediction systems in operational flood forecasting centres can clearly be seen in Europe,.
EFAS uses multiple weather forecasts and EPS as input. Its forecasts are based on two deterministic, medium-range forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the German Weather Service (DWD), (and thus different models) and on two sets of EPS: One from ECMWF which covers the medium-range up to 15 days globally (with a spatial resolution of ~30 km and 51 members, and one from the Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO), a limited area model EPS covering most of Europe with a shorter range up to 5 days (with a spatial resolution of 7 km and 16 members). The reason for using the shorter term EPS is to enhance the spread of EPS within the first few days and to have a finer grid information in particular for mountainous areas. This allows to better identify the location of the floods within the river basin . In a case study it has been demonstrated that using the eight global medium-range EPS available worldwide can provide a higher reliability for the results, but is computationally intensive.
European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
initiative to increase preparedness for riverine floods across Europe.
History
Over the last decades severe fluvial floods of trans-national dimensions have taken place in Europe. There is evidence that in particular transboundary floods can be more severe in their magnitude, affect larger areas, result in higher death tolls, and cause more financial damage than non-shared river floods do . The European Environmental Agency estimated that floods in Europe between 1998 and 2002 caused about 700 deaths, the displacement of about half a million people and at least 25 billion Euros in insured economic losses (EEA, 2003). Some river basins suffered repeated flooding within a time span of a few years only - for example the Rhine and Meuse floods in 1993 and 1995 or the Po floods in 1994 and 2000.The disastrous floods in the Elbe and Danube basin in summer 2002, acted as a wake-up call for the National Authorities as well as the European Commission to investigate new strategies for flood prevention and protection, with focus on coordinated actions among countries sharing the same river basin.Shortly after the 2002 floods, the European Commission announced in the communication COM(2002)-481 the development of a European Flood Alert System (EFAS).
EFAS is part of a strategy for improved disaster management in Europe to reduce the impact of transnational floods through early warning. First of all, the aim of the system is to provide, useful, complementary and shared information on upcoming flood events to the national hydrological services. Furthermore, EFAS provides for the first time a coherent overview on ongoing and forecasted floods across Europe, which is needed for improved coordination of international civil protection actions on European scale during severe flood events.
Project
Following the encouraging results of a research study, the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) was launched in 2003 at the DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission,.It is being developed by the FLOODS action of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, located in Ispra, Italy. Since 2005, EFAS provides national water authorities and the European Commission with early flood warning information up to 10 days in advance. Since 2007, when the EFAS-Information System (EFAS-IS was launched, hydrological partner organisations can access the real-time flood forecasts any time and interact with the EFAS development and monitoring team. Real-time forecasts are password protected and only distributed to those organisations that have signed a specific agreement. This is to avoid that real-time flood warning information is distributed to non-experts who are not trained on the specific EFAS products. Currently the EFAS network holds 27 partner organisations. An archive of EFAS results with information older than 1 month is publicly available on the floods portal of the action.
Closely associated with EFAS are two major data collection systems. One is the European Terrestrian Network for River discharge (ETN-R) which has been launched by the European Commission to collect realtime waterlevels and discharges across Europe's transnational river basins. ETN-R is being executed by the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC), which operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation. The second project is the EU-FLOOD-GIS, a comprehensive data integration system to support the flood forecasting activity on floods in Europe. It collects meteorological and hydrological data in real-time data, including ETN-R, across Europe and also holds historic time series needed for calibration and validation of the system. Furthermore, information on cross sections, reservoirs, flood extent information, collected for specific case studies, are held in this data base. Because of the restricted data policy in Europe, EU-FLOOD-GIS data cannot be distributed. Only the associated catalogue will be made available in the future, after all data providers have agreed to this.
EFAS has been declared a testbed of the Hydrological Ensemble Prediction Experiment
Hydrological Ensemble Prediction Experiment
HEPEX is an international initiative bringing together hydrologists, meteorologists, researchers and endusers to develop advanced probabilistic hydrological forecast techniques for improved flood, drought and water management. HEPEX was launched in 2004 as an independent, cooperative international...
(HEPEX)
Ensemble Prediction Systems – key to longer flood warning times
Most hydrological services rely either on observations only or on short-term deterministic rainfall forecasts of up to two days or less because the high degree of uncertainty in weather forecasts at longer lead times. Since these uncertainties are also unpredictable, they render the results unreliable and therefore not useful for decision making. Since the last 10 years, however, the hydrological community is looking increasingly at the use of ensemble prediction systems (EPS)Ensemble forecasting
Ensemble forecasting is a numerical prediction method that is used to attempt to generate a representative sample of the possible future states of a dynamical system...
instead of single (deterministic) forecasts for flood warning times beyond 48 hours. EPS have already become an integral part of operational weather forecasts over the past years. They are designed to give a measure of the predictability of the weather and uncertainty in the model solution for lead times up to two weeks which would be considered well outside the range of predictability for deterministic models. The trend for implementing hydrological ensemble prediction systems in operational flood forecasting centres can clearly be seen in Europe,.
EFAS uses multiple weather forecasts and EPS as input. Its forecasts are based on two deterministic, medium-range forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the German Weather Service (DWD), (and thus different models) and on two sets of EPS: One from ECMWF which covers the medium-range up to 15 days globally (with a spatial resolution of ~30 km and 51 members, and one from the Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO), a limited area model EPS covering most of Europe with a shorter range up to 5 days (with a spatial resolution of 7 km and 16 members). The reason for using the shorter term EPS is to enhance the spread of EPS within the first few days and to have a finer grid information in particular for mountainous areas. This allows to better identify the location of the floods within the river basin . In a case study it has been demonstrated that using the eight global medium-range EPS available worldwide can provide a higher reliability for the results, but is computationally intensive.