The Global Flood Awareness System is a global hydrological service delivering hydrological forecasts to registered users since 2011, and now delivers a fully 24/7 operational service.
It is an initiative funded by the Copernicus Emergency Management Service of the European Commission, under its Early Warning Service framework. Forecasts are freely available to all and GloFAS currently has over 1,600 registered users from a range of sectors, including Hydro-Meteorological services, academia, and the humanitarian sector. See http://www.globalfloods.eu/
GloFAS couples state-of-the art weather forecasts with a hydrological model. Its continental scale set-up provides downstream countries with information on upstream river conditions as well as continental and global overviews. Currently, GloFAS provides global overviews of upcoming flood events (up to 30 days ahead) and hydrological outlooks summarising wet and dry conditions (up to 4 months ahead) in rivers across the world. In addition to forecast maps, forecast hydrographs and persistence diagrams are also made available through an interactive web interface, with a dedicated OGC-compliant Web Coverage Service currently under development, and possibility for a tailored ftp service to be set-up for daily dissemination of forecast files to advanced users.
GloFAS is co-developed by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast ECMWF, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission as part of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS), and the University of Reading (UK). It is operated by ECMWF.
Partner: European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
Target Segment of the Conference: Hydrological Products
Relationship to other Conference Segments:
Hydrological Data Management: GloFAS relies on a number of data flows, including observational data for calibration, verification, and initial conditions of the forecasts; Numerical Weather Prediction forecasts as future forcings; and a number of land surface static maps as input to the modelling chain.
Hydrological Services - Product Delivery: As a fully functioning hydrological service, GloFAS has an interactive forecast viewer regularly tested by users. GloFAS has an established community of users from a range of sectors, including Hydro-Met services, academia, and the humanitarian sector, and engages with its users regularly through its GloFAS Community Learning Framework, in a co-design development cycle. Collaborators include the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (representing disaster response community), the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System RIMES (representing the early warning service community, operating in 12 countries in SE Asia and Africa), and the National Centre of Natural Hazard Monitoring and Warning (Cemaden) in Brazil (representing national warning agencies)
Geographical coverage: Global
Connection to the development and delivery of a hydrological service for prosperity:
GloFAS already delivers daily hydrological forecasts for all major rivers of the world, with outlooks up to 4 months ahead produced monthly. The forecasts are available to anyone without licensing restrictions, except in Europe where flood warnings are only available to specific users. Currently the set-up has been through user-tailored ftp, but the service could evolve towards a more automatic system if required. In addition, through its interactive web service (including external Web Mapping Service), the GloFAs platform can be tailored by users to suit their own needs.