The European Flood Alert System (EFAS): 4th annual user meeting

• Agenda
• List of Participants
• Presentations

The EFAS annual user meeting 2009 will be held at ECMWF from 29 to 30 January 2009.

Every year DG Joint Research Centre organises annual user workshops with representatives of the EFAS partner network for information and training purposes. The European Flood Alert System (EFAS) was launched in 2003 by the European Commission with the aim to increase warning time for floods in trans-national European river basins and to explicitly meet two main objectives: first, to complement Member States activities on flood preparedness, and second to provide the European Commission with information for improved aid and crisis management in the case of large trans-national flood events that might need intervention on an international level.

Since 2005 EFAS provides national water authorities and the European Commission with early flood warning information up to 10 days in advance based on multiple weather inputs. The prototype is set-up for the whole of Europe on a 5-km grid and provides the national hydrological centres twice a day with medium-range ensemble flood forecasting information. Currently, lead times of 3 to10 days are achieved through the incorporation of medium-range weather forecasts from the German Weather Service (DWD), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), comprising a full set of 51 members from the Ensemble Prediction System (EPS). In addition 16 members from COSMO-LEPS provided by ARPA-SIM are now also included.

During the annual meetings the performance of EFAS during the previous year is being reported, an update of EFAS developments are presented and future developments discussed with the partners. On recommendation of some EFAS partners an additional day for hands on training with probabilistic forecasting - both meteorological and hydrological - as well as the EFAS interface is taken place on the 30th.

For further information please see:

Meeting location: ECMWF

Information about ECMWF and how find us can be found here.

Hotels

Click here for a selection of hotels and guest houses in Reading. If you do not find what you want try a more comprehensive list of accomodation (online booking available) here , but be aware that some hotels/guest houses may be far away from ECMWF or Reading town centre .

Information about Reading

Further information about Reading can be found here.

Contact

Registration for this workshop is by invitation only.

For further enquiries please contact Jutta Thielen