The European Flood Alert System - a European Commission initiative to increase preparedness for riverine floods across Europe
Introduction
| Following the disastrous floods in the Elbe and Danube river basins in August 2002, the European Commission announced in the communication (COM(2002)-481) the development of a European Flood Alert System (EFAS). EFAS - developed within the WDNH project - will be capable of providing medium-range flood simulations across Europe with a lead-time between 3 to 10 days. The benefit of EFAS is two-fold. First, EFAS should provide the European Commission with useful information for the preparation and management of aid during a flood crisis. Second, National Water Authorities should benefit from additional medium-range flood information that might contribute to increased preparedness in an upcoming flood event. EFAS is aimed at complementing national flood forecasting systems, not to replace them. The European Flood Alert System (EFAS) activity is at present in a development and testing phase at the European Commission Joint Research Centre. Since the beginning of 2003 the European Commission DG Joint Research Centre (JRC) is developing a prototype of EFAS in close collaboration with relevant institutions in the Member States. The JRC benefits from experience gained already during the European Flood Forecasting System (EFFS) project (Reggiani et al, 2004) financed by DG Research.
The advantages of EFAS for the European Commission are
The advantages of EFAS for the National hydrological Institutes could be
Contact person: Jutta Thielen (jutta.thielen@jrc.it) |
Latest technical River Basins
Services
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Regularly updated products
derived from the EFAS system
Daily soil moisture forecast
calculated with DWD forecasting data:
Trend (7 days) Anomaly
Link to the pre-operational and password protected online EFAS information system for daily early flood warning information to EFAS partners.
