The Global Flood Awareness Systems (GloFAS) and the Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) are operational, 24/7/365, freely accessible web services of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) for global flood forecasting and monitoring.
GloFAS
GloFAS provides probabilistic hydrological predictions and overviews across the world on time scales from days to few months, independent of administrative and political boundaries. GloFAS products are based on flood forecast simulations and are represented as a set of easily readable maps aimed at offering the users a fast and dynamic situational awareness about potential flood risks anywhere around the world.
GloFAS medium-range flood forecasts provide a global overview of upcoming flood events for the next 30 days. The forecasts are updated every day and they include the potential socio-economic impacts.
The GloFAS seasonal hydrological outlook summarises the hydrological situation over the next 4 months and predicts changes to the long-term river flows. The outlook is issued every month.
GloFAS service is complementary to national and regional services. It can be especially beneficial for the flood risk management of large trans-national river basins, as well as for international and national water management or aid-related organisations. Water resources manager can also benefit from GloFAS seasonal hydrological outlook for decision-making (reservoir management, navigation, irrigation or drought risk management).
GFM
The GFM product complements the GloFAS by providing a continuous global, systematic, and automated satellite-based monitoring of all land surface areas possibly affected by flooding. All incoming Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar images are immediately processed and analysed by three different flood detection algorithms; GFM products are delivered with an 8-hour lag from satellite data acquisition.
GMF products that can be grouped into four categories: (1) water bodies (Observed Flood Extent, Observed Water Extent, Reference Water Mask), (2) quality-related (Exclusion mask, Uncertainty values, Advisory flags), (3) Sentinel-1 data specifics (footprint, schedule, and the related metadata), and (4) impacts estimate (Affected population, Affected land cover).
The advantage of the GFM approach with respect to on demand mapping is that the protocol is fully automated and absolutely no time is lost due to human interventions in the imagery production chain. Due to its timeliness, and to the availability of the results in many standard formats and different access points, GFM products are suitable for a wide variety of users, ranging from national civil protection authorities to humanitarian bodies, global insurance companies and the general public as well.
All GloFAS and GFM products are freely accessible. GloFAS and GFM key users include national and regional water authorities, civil protection and first line responders, insurance companies, international humanitarian aid organisations and the EU’s Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC).