Early flood forecasting and monitoring information enables national and regional flood management authorities to increase their resilience and preparedness, reducing the socio-economic impact of flood events. 

The European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) provides complementary flood forecast information to national or regional authorities and an overview of upcoming riverine flood events for ten days, including possible flood impacts. As an early warning system EFAS is used also to pre-task the CEMS Rapid Mapping component to acquire satellite images for potentially disastrous forecasted floods. The global scale equivalent to EFAS is the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), which is an operational, freely accessible web service for global hydrological forecasting and monitoring. It provides complementary probabilistic hydrological predictions of river flows worldwide. Its data are, therefore, especially beneficial for the flood risk management of sizeable trans-national river basins and for international and national water management or aid-related organisations. 

More recently a new near-real-time service that provides a continuous global, systematic, and automated satellite-based monitoring of all land surface areas possibly affected by floods has been called the Global Flood Monitoring Product (GFM) has been added to EFAS and GloFAS. The new product enables a fully automatic global scale monitoring of floods. 

Visualisation showing GloFAS Flood Summary forecast available on August 18th. (Credit: European Union, Copernicus EMS, Global Flood Awareness System, 2022)