The recently published Technical note: Surface fields for global environmental modelling provides a thorough description of the methodology and raw data used for the generation of the GloFAS 0.05 degrees surface fields (often referred to as "static maps").

These surface fields are a set of raster maps describing terrain morphology, river network and channel geometry, lakes and reservoirs location, land cover and land use features, soil and vegetation properties and water demand for human use. Information provided by these surface fields enables the modelling of the hydrological cycle in different landscapes and land use contexts.

The GloFAS …

by Richard Davies, floodlist 

Extremely heavy rainfall in late July 2024 caused catastrophic landslides and flooding in Wayanad District in the state of Kerala, India.

According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Kerala experienced extremely heavy rainfall in isolated regions from 29 to 30 July. In a 24-hour period, Thrissur recorded 340 mm of rain; Palakkad 300 mm; Kozhikode 280 mm; and Wayanad 280 mm.

After the floods and landslides in Wayanad …

Please find the link to the new EWDS Beta here: https://ewds-beta.climate.copernicus.eu/

ECMWF has implemented a new state-of-the-art data access infrastructure to host the Climate and Atmospheric Data Stores (CDS and ADS, respectively). All layers of the infrastructure are being modernised: the front-end web interface, the back-end software engine, and the underlying cloud infrastructure hosting the service and core data repositories.

As part of this development, a new data store for the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) has been created. The CEMS Early Warning Data Store (EWDS) will host all the historical and …

by Richard Davies, floodlist

Heavy rainfall in the wake of Cyclone Remal caused rivers to rise in areas of northern Bangladesh in early June 2024, triggering a phase of flooding that affected over 700,000 people in early June 2024. Heavy rain from mid-June caused further severe flooding in the country's northern and southern regions.

Cyclone Remal in Bangladesh

Cyclone Remal struck Bangladesh on 27 May 2024, causing severe damage due to strong winds, storm surge and heavy rain. The cyclone affected 3.75 million people across …

The Annual Survey for the reference year 2023 was conduced in early 2024: the results and the list of FOLLOW-UP actions are available from THIS PAGE.

Overall, the results indicate that there is high satisfaction with GloFAS and GFM service and products. However, there are opportunities for further improvement. More specifically, the survey responses allowed to identify 8 medium-term (1 year) and 4 long-term (more than 1 year) follow-up actions.

3 actions have …

CEMS Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) product to be affected by scheduled maintenance session, on 16 July 2024 from 9.00 to 13.00 CEST

A maintenance session that is scheduled to take place on Tuesday 16 July 2024, from 09:00 to 13:00 CEST, will affect the operation of the GFM product via the GloFAS / EFAS Map Viewers.

The effects of the scheduled maintenance session on GFM operations are summarised below:

• During the maintenance session, the GFM near real-time processing will not be available. …

by Richard Davies, floodlist

Heavy rain from late April and into early May 2024 caused flooding on a massive scale in the southern state of Rio Grande Do Sul State in Brazil.

In early May the state governor declared a state of emergency after multiple rivers had broken their banks, including the Taquari, Uruguay, Jacuí, Toropi, Quaraí and Pardinho. Lake Guaíba reached record levels at Porto Alegre.

<img alt="Brazil | Severe weather, floods and EU response - DG ECHO Daily Map | 15/05/2024. Image credit: © European Union, 2024. …

A new visualization scheme for the CEMS Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) product was implemented on 22 May 2024. With the new visualization scheme, GFM users can immediately see which of the latest Sentinel-1 image tiles processed by the GFM product contain a significant (i.e. unusually high) amount of flooding, compared with the entire historical time-series of Sentinel-1 images for that geographic location.

The colour legend for the new GFM visualization scheme is shown below. As can be seen, where the flooded area detected by the GFM product is unusually high, the outline of the …

by Richard Davies, floodlist

Kenya experienced above-average rainfall during its March-April-May (MAM) long rains season that resulted in flooding and landslide from late March, throughout April 2024 and into early May. As of early May, a total of 42 out of the 47 counties in Kenya were affected.

Areas around the capital Nairobi saw severe flooding in late March 2024. Local media reported multiple fatalities as of 25 March 2024, including a police officer.

In early April, over 50 passengers were rescued after a bus travelling from Garissa to Nairobi was swept away …

Bug-fix release to address issue with GFM observed flood extent and likelihood values

In recent weeks, the GFM algorithm development team has investigated some inconsistent flood classification likelihood values that were spotted for certain Sentinel-1 scenes.

It was discovered that one of the three individual algorithms that are deployed in parallel by the GFM ensemble flood mapping flood algorithm, produced inaccurate likelihood values in cases where the geographic extent of the reference and near real-time images scenes used by that algorithm, differed. This in …