Geographical Information Systems - An Integral Part of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS)

Over the past ten years we have observed the development of powerful early warning and decision support systems for natural and man-made hazards such as forest fires, tsunamis, floods, oil spills, chemical releases in air and water and many more. Their development became feasible through the revolutionary increase in computing and network power over the past years and the advanced Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis tools that are now available. Traditionally GIS was rather associated with static data such as topography, forest areas, urban areas or infrastructure, occasional satellite images, allowing to assess current situations and to make projections for the future ¿ but all in a rather static way. The incorporation of dynamic data sets such as remotely sensed data (vegetation cover, snow cover), gridded weather forecast data (precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration), weather station observations can now be received at high frequencies is becoming increasingly used also in a GIS environment to form the basis for effective operational decision support tools. GIS allows these information to be displayed easily and to be combined with other information locally or through internet applications, making GIS systems based systems very powerful and useful communication tools.

THIELEN DEL POZO Jutta;  SALAMON Peter;  DE ROO Arie; 

2009-01-13

Grupo de Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica, Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles

JRC47743

1578-5157,   

www.geo-focus.org,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC47743,