Seasonal forecasts of river discharge and related data by the European Flood Awareness System

This dataset provides gridded modelled daily hydrological time series forced with seasonal meteorological forecasts. The dataset is a consistent representation of the most important hydrological variables across the European Flood Awareness (EFAS) domain. The temporal resolution is daily forecasts initialised once a month consisting of:

River discharge
Volumetric soil moisture
Snow water equivalent
Soil wetness index (root zone)
Runoff water equivalent (surface plus subsurface)

Also provided are auxiliary (time invariant) data to aid interpretation of river discharge and soil moisture data. These auxiliary data are the upstream area, elevation, soil depth, wilting capacity and field capacity. The latter three are provided at three soil levels, one for each of the three soil layers represented in LISFLOOD.
This data set was produced by forcing the open-source LISFLOOD hydrological model at a 1x1 arcminute resolution (~1.5 km at EFAS latitudes) with seasonal meteorological ensemble forecasts. For version 4.0 and older, the open-source LISFLOOD hydrological model was forced at a 5x5km resolution. The forecasts are initialised on the first of each month with a lead time of 215 days at 24-hour time steps. The meteorological data are seasonal forecasts (SEAS5) from the European Centre of Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with 51 ensemble members. The forecasts are available from November 2020.
Companion datasets, also available through the Early Warning Data Store (EWDS), are seasonal reforecasts for research, local skill assessment and post-processing of the seasonal forecasts. There are also medium-range forecasts for users who want to look at shorter time ranges. These are accompanied by historical simulations which can be used to derive the hydrological climatology, and medium-range reforecasts. For users looking for global hydrological data, we refer to the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) forecasts and historical simulations.
All these datasets are part of the operational flood forecasting within the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS), which is managed, technically implemented and developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.