The European Commission has announced that as of 26 November 2012 the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) is now fully operational. EFAS provides warning of severe weather (flood forecasts) for Europe using ECMWF's Ensemble Prediction System as a main input.
The warnings are available through a password protected web site to national hydrological and meteorological services responsible for warnings in the particular country. ECMWF is the computational centre of the EFAS system working alongside partners from Sweden, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Spain.
EFAS is part of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Emergency Management Service and has now reached the status of a fully operational service. EFAS contributes in the case of major flood events to better protection of the European citizen, the environment, property and cultural heritage. Forecasts focus on the medium range and on cross-boundary catchments. ECMWF will benefit from this project through improved understanding of land surface hydrology and through validation and diagnostics of ECMWF predictions of extreme weather events (flooding). For more details visit http://www.efas.eu/
