The European Flood Awareness System has a wide product portfolio covering the forecast of large-scale riverine floods as well as flash floods, computing hazard as well as impact predictions, for the latter considering location specific vulnerability data. At the same time, EFAS monitors national hydrological situation across Europe and maps locations where the national/regional threshold levels have been exceeded. This is further completed through the embedding of the GFM (Global Flood Monitoring), which maps in an automatic manner floods in near real-time and computes associated impact estimations.


      EFAS product portfolio (main products)


EFAS Products derive from flood forecast simulations. Users receive products as a set of easily readable maps aimed at offering users a fast and dynamic situational awareness about possible flood risks. Some more information on the four main product categories:

  • EFAS medium-range flood forecast provides an overview of upcoming flood events for the next 10 days, including possible flood impacts. The forecasts are updated twice daily and are used to send flood notifications to EFAS partners of predicated high risk of flooding. EFAS can also warn the CEMS On-Demand mapping component to enable a faster mapping of a flood through pre-tasking.
  • EFAS indicators of flash floods are based on high-resolution numerical weather predictions with up to 5 days lead-time as well as radar-based precipitation monitoring and “nowcasting” with up to 6 hours.
  • EFAS sub-seasonal and seasonal hydrological outlooks summarise the hydrological situation over the next 6 and 8 weeks respectively, and predict changes with respect to the hydrological extremes (high and low flows). Outlooks can be used to support various water-related applications such as reservoir management, navigation, irrigation or drought risk management. The seasonal hydrological outlook is issued monthly, while sub-seasonal is issued daily from 28 June 2023 and twice weekly beforehand.
  • The Global Flood Monitoring, which is embedded into the EFAS interface, provides an automatic monitoring of floods in near real-time independent of weather conditions and daytime.


EFAS Products are accessible through the EFAS-IS (www.efas.eu), but also via web services and direct download. All real-time EFAS forecasts and products are restricted and only accessible to “EFAS partners” (see Section “EFAS user community”), to respect the Member States exclusive mandate for issuing flood warnings. All other EFAS products, such as the initial conditions, the national and satellite-based flood monitoring, the seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts are publically available in real-time, and even the restricted EFAS real-time forecasts are released publically after an embargo of 30 days.


More information on the various EFAS product lines can be found on the EFAS website:


Whereas a technical documentation of each EFAS layer is available in the EFAS wiki: