The Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS)

Following the development of a continental early flood warning system on European scale, the feasibility of operating a global flood forecasting system is being tested. The system has been set-up by coupling the operational output of the hydrological land-surface scheme of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) and a simplified version of LISFLOOD, the hydrological model of the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS). Operational forecasts are run on daily basis with 45-day horizon using 15-day VarEPS weather prediction from ECMWF as input. A streamflow climatology has been calcu-lated with ERA-Interim data as weather forcing for a period of 21 years from which critical flood thresholds have been derived. Discharge forecasts are then compared against these thresholds to detect flood warnings. The forecasting system now runs in an experimental mode since almost one year and results looks very en-couraging. Some of the major flood events in the past recent months have been captured by the system, e.g. October 2011 floods in South-East Asia, January 2012 flooding in Australia and in Namibia. A more detailed statistical analysis of the results is currently undertaken.

THIELEN DEL POZO Jutta;  PAPPENBERGER Florian;  ALFIERI Lorenzo;  BUREK Peter Andreas;  KALAS Milan;  SALAMON Peter;  THIEMIG Vera;  DE ROO Arie;  MURARO Davide;  DUTRA Emmanuel; 

2013-11-04

Taylor and Francis Group

JRC70176

978-0-415-62144-1,