The Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) product is a new component of the EU’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) that provides continuous monitoring of floods worldwide, by processing and analysing in near real-time (NRT) all incoming Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery acquired by the EU’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, in Interferometric Wide Swath (IW) mode and as Ground Range Detected (GRD) products. The GFM product is designed to deliver, in NRT, critical information on ongoing floods events to users worldwide, including national authorities, emergency units, research centres, decision-makers and other stakeholders.

Detailed descriptions of the EFAS Monitoring Products are documented on the EODC wiki pages: https://extwiki.eodc.eu/GFM/PUM/Products

For support relating to the GFM product on EFAS, please contact: gfm-support@eodc.eu 

A brief overview of the GFM integration in EFAS

Account

It is worth noting that accounts stored in the GFM service are identified by email.

This means that if you use the same email for your EFAS and GloFAS account you will be able to see your areas of interest and product notifications in both services.

Upon login of EFAS-IS you will automatically be created a GFM account. There is no need to register.

GFM widget in EFAS

The GFM widget can be found in the top right of the EFAS map viewer application:

Clicking it will append a new widget below the already existing Layers widget

This widget contains a few features:

Date selector specifically for GFM layers  

Area of interest (AOI) for which your account will receive product notifications

In the main part of the AOI you can create/erase or save an area of interest

  • Create allows you to draw a rectangle, this must be less than 1000000km² or the save will show an error. 
  • Erase removes the rectangle that was drawn
  • Save allows your to save your area of interest to the GFM
  • Once saved each AOI is shown:
    • There are 4 functions here
      • View - shows the AOI on the map
      • Hide - hides the AOI from the map
      • Edit on GFM - opens the GFM website
      • Enable Notifications - enables product notifications for that AOI

Product Notifications for AOIs which you have enabled notifications, by default they are disabled!

  • You will not receive past notifications for the AOI, only future ones. For past notifications you have to visit the GFM website where you can additionally filter products by date: https://portal.gfm.eodc.eu/products.

Product notifications are grouped by Area of Interest, Date and Time. The first 3 Italy's are for different times but all for 31/10/2022, the bottom one is for 01/11/2022.

Each notification has 4 features:

  • Open group to see available products
    • In here you can choose which products to download
  • Show the AOI on the map
  • Hide the AOI on the map
  • Edit on GFM

Static Layers in EFAS


The GFM integration adds the available GFM static layers in a new as a new option in the menu where the rest of the layers are in EFAS.

These, by default, match the forecast date selected, but the GFM widget provides ability to select a specific date only for the GFM layers. This allows comparison of forecasts and observations from different dates.

Logging into GFM

You can log directly into the GFM portal by visiting https://portal.gfm.eodc.eu/login or clicking any of the "Edit on GFM" buttons.

From here you can quickly "Sign in with EFAS", or GloFAS, to access your GFM account and any information that you saved (e.g. AOIs).