European Flood Alert System

The European Flood Awareness System is a European Commission initiative to increase preparedness for riverine floods across Europe.

The disastrous floods in Elbe and Danube rivers in 2002 confronted the European Commission with non-coherent flood warning information from different sources and of variable quality, complicating planning and organization of aid. In response to this event, the European Commission initiated the development of a European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) to increase the preparedness for floods in Europe. Following a Communication of the Commission in 2002 on the Elbe and Danube floods in 2002, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission was assigned with the task to develop EFAS. Its development has been financially supported by DG ENTR, DG ECHO, the European Parliament as well as Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia through detachment of National Experts.

The aim of EFAS is to gain time for preparedness measures before major flood events strike particularly for trans-national river basins both in the Member States as well as on European level. This is achieved by providing complementary, added value information to the National hydrological services and by keeping the European Response and Coordination Centre informed about ongoing floods and about the possibility of upcoming floods across Europe.

From 2005 to 2010 EFAS was tested in real-time mode, first with the National hydrological services and later also with the European Civil Protection. In 2011 EFAS became part of the Emergency Management Service of the COPERNICUS Initial Operations and in support to European Civil Protection. The operational components have been outsourced to Member State organisations. EFAS is running fully operational since autumn 2012.

The European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) is the first operational European system monitoring and forecasting floods across Europe. It provides probabilistic, flood early warning information up to 10 days in advance to its partners - the National Hydrological Services and the European Response and Coordination Centre (ERCC).

The operational components of EFAS have been outsourced to different centres:

EFAS is running fully operational since October 2012 as a 7/375 service. The Central European flood event of June 2013 was the first big scale crisis during which the operational EFAS was actively reporting to the ERCC.

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