GloFAS uses a number of river location for monitoring and evaluating the system. They are also referred to as diagnostic points. There are few categories of these stations, depending on the available information and the type of use of these stations. These are briefly described below.
Diagnostic points
GloFAS 'diagnostic points' describes a set of river locations distributed across the world to provide an overview of GloFAS behaviour. They include catchments for which the GloFAS team has river discharge observations, or catchments requested by users to be monitored on the web interface, but excluding points with insufficient or uncertain metadata information, or that cannot be represented onto the model river network. They also include 'synthetic points' selected by the GloFAS team to provide a comprehensive geographical distribution across the world. Synthetic points are not associated with any metadata, such as station name or a provider.
As more observational data or user-defined points are made available to GloFAS, synthetic points are going to be progressively replaced with catchments that has station names and often also observations. In April 2021, GloFAS had 5997 diagnostic points.
Web reporting points
GloFAS 'web reporting points' are the GloFAS diagnostic points excluding synthetic points.
Web reporting points are used to monitor the GloFAS system through the interactive map-viewer layer 'Reporting Points', shown as grey square marker if no flood are present and changed to a flood marker (colourful symbols) when flood conditions are forecasted for that station. In April 2021, GloFAS had 2428 web reporting points.