The European Flood Awareness System is about to start a new project for the further development and operation of the EFAS Meteorological Data Collection Centre which will help to support reliable flood forecasting up to ten days in advance.
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is carrying out the work for EFAS, which has been fully operational under the Copernicus emergency management service since 2012.
KISTERS, the German-headquartered solutions provider for water management, together with the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) of the German Weather Service (DWD), have won the contract for the Copernicus project.
The new system will gather measurement data from all participating countries on precipitation, air temperature, wind speed and direction, and will then validate, manage and store it in a central database. This consistent European pool of data will enable scientific evaluation using standardized methods. The linkage of measurement data together with weather and runoff forecasts will, moreover, support reliable flood forecasting up to ten days in advance.
Appropriate early warnings will be automatically sent to both the national and regional flood control centre of the EFAS member states as well as the European Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC). The technical basis for the data centre is the water management information system WISKI, which reports, evaluates and disseminates the meteorological situation several times per day. The system is designed to be able to integrate and process rapidly growing volumes of data of the future. High-performance validation methods and the real-time processing of high resolution time series round off WISKI’s range of service.
The European Flood Awareness System has been operating under the aegis of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service since October 2012. The institution’s objective is to prepare member states optimally for climate-related catastrophes.
As well as generating early flood warnings the Meteorological Data Collection Centre analyzes the general weather situation and shows the relationships between anomalies in the weather and occurrences of flooding.
Copernicus is an EU program for the establishment of European information services based on observations of the Earth from satellites and local (not spatial) data. Set up by the European Commission with the support of the European Space Agency and the European Environment Agency, its objective is the observation and forecasting of the state of the environment on land, water and in the atmosphere.
Copernicus is a user-oriented program, which makes its information services freely and openly available to users – currently most of these are public authorities.
KISTERS AG is a fast growing mid-size IT firm which is headquartered in Aachen, Germany. With subsidiaries in North America, Australia, New Zealand, China and several European countries, in the German-speaking regions, KISTERS software is the market leader in water management and energy data management.
WISKI, the KISTERS water information system is software for network monitoring management focusing on the compilation and analysis of hydrologic data. WISKI is used by hundreds of clients with several thousand licences worldwide for the monitoring of surface and groundwater, meteorology, flood warnings, reservoir operations and security, water quality und urban drainage sectors.
The German Weather Service has operated the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre since 1989 in order to publish regular globally scanned analyses of land surface precipitation on behalf of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) based on its precipitation database, which is the most comprehensive in the world.
Click here for more information on the major Environment Agency Flood and Coast 2016 conference and exhibition in Telford from 23rd-25th February 2016.