Happy birthday to GloFAS!

Contributed by Liz Stephens and Florian Pappenberger

The Global Flood Awareness System celebrates its 3rd birthday today; it began running on a pre-operational basis at ECMWF on July 4th 2011.

While the system hasn’t had much focussed developmental support since its birth, various people have been keeping an eye on it while they have been looking after its older sibling, EFAS.

The birth of the Global Floods Partnership in 2014 will mean that GloFAS is developing its own friendship group, and as it grows older, we are seeing more people turning to it for advice and support.

The next year is going to be very exciting; as GloFAS enters Kindergarten it will no longer hang around with EFAS as it will be given its own webpage. There will also be less visible changes; in the Autumn a new model will include updates to the river network and an improved representation of transmission losses.

*GloFAS is a global scale flood forecasting model, developed by JRC and ECMWF. A paper by Lorenzo Alfieri et al. (2013) on the system can be found here.