Implemented by the European Commission as part of the Copernicus Programme

Calibration of Lisflood routing components

To prepare for GloFAS forecasts v2.0 and GloFAS Seasonal v2.0 cycles, a major calibration exercise of the Lisflood hydrological routing component was conducted

The calibration used ECMWF re-forecast control forcing (surface and sub-surface runoff) from June 1995 to June 2015, and was conducted on 1287 stations worldwide with available daily discharge observations ( Hirpa et al., 2018). The calibration was performed using an evolutionary optimization algorithm with the Kling-Gupta Efficiency ( KGE, Gupta et al., 2009) as objective function. As a result of the calibration, the version 2.0 discharge simulation skill has improved for the majority of stations (increased KGE score relative to version 1.0), and it is expected to improve the real-time version 2.0 discharge and flood forecast skill.

Lisflood calibration
Improvement provided by the Lisflood calibration (values show change in the KGE score).

Calibration is only possible if good quality river flow observations are available, and the team is grateful to all data providers who have given us access to their data. See Data and services pages.