It couples state-of-the art weather forecasts with an hydrological model. Find out more!

Global Flood Awareness System in a nutshell

The Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), jointly developed by the European Commission and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is independent of administrative and political boundaries. It couples state-of-the art weather forecasts with a hydrological model and with its continental scale set-up it provides downstream countries with information on upstream river conditions as well as continental and global overviews.

  • GloFAS produces daily flood forecasts in a pre-operational manner since June 2011
  • GloFAS has shown its potential during the floods in Pakistan in August 2013 or in Sudan in September 2013
In its test phase this global forecast system was able to predict floods up to two weeks in advance. The European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC) will now continue with further research and development, rigorous testing and adaptations of the system to create an operational tool for decision makers, including national and regional water authorities, water resource managers, hydropower companies, civil protection and first line responders, and international humanitarian aid organisations.

GloFAS Model Details For hydrologists!

Hydrological modeling
River discharge is simulated by the Lisflood hydrological model (van der Knijff et al., 2010) for the flow routing in the river network and the groundwater mass balance. The model is set up on global coverage with horizontal grid resolution of 0.1° (about 10 km in mid-latitude regions) and daily time step for input/output data. Read more >>
Meteorological data
To set up a forecasting and warning system that runs on a daily basis with global coverage, initial conditions and input forcing data must be provided seamlessly to every point within the domain. To this end, two products are used. The first consists of operational ensemble forecasts of nearsurface meteorological parameters. The second is a longterm dataset consistent with daily forecasts, used to derive a reference climatology. Read more >>
Case studies
2008 - 2014 Myanmar and Nepal
This case study provides a summary of the results for the performance of the GloFAS ensemble mean discharge forecast compared to observations for several locations in two river basins, the Ayeyarwady in Myanmar and the Narayani in Nepal. Read more >>
2010 Pakistan floods
The system demonstrated its potential by detecting a number of flooding events of the past 3 yr in major world rivers, with forecast lead time often larger than 10 days. A striking example is that of the severe floods that hit Pakistan in summer of 2010. Read more >>
Forecast Viewer
Last Update on 10/01/2017 Get In Touch

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Prototype for social media analysis for flood events

This example shows an aggregated 24 hours filtered flood signal from Twitter for 24th of July 2013 in form of a heat map (read color=high signal). It is considered as a valid signal Twitter messages containing top 25 bigrams extracted from Twitter streaming over the last 10 days prior to the day of 24 hourly analysis.

Hover the map and zoom in with mouse wheel!