The computations and web services of the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) are executed and hosted by ECMWF. The EFAS medium-range flood forecasting system has been developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission since 2002. It became operational at ECMWF in 2012.
EFAS forecasts are used by national services responsible for flood forecasting in their territory as additional information and by the European Emergency Response Centre as basis for daily planning of activities. The system has provided important information and warnings for this event. For more details please see the information released by the JRC and on the HEPEX websites.
The figure shows the Extreme Forecast Index (EFI) and Shift Of Tails Index (SOT) for total precipitation accumulation between 31 May 2013 00UTC and 3 June 2013 00UTC. The forecast was initialised on 29 May 2013 12UTC. EFI reached high values, above 0.9, in the affected areas which means that most members of the ECMWF forecast ensemble predicted rainfall close to or above the climate maximum. Positive SOT values confirm the prediction of an extreme event.