Before the flood, a warning
Baku, October 14 (AZERTAC). Knowing that a severe flood is likely to hit your region in coming days has its advantages: if you are organized enough you can evacuate people from at-risk areas, protect structures and maybe even call for international assistance.
This month, Ireland officially signed up to a European system that can forecast serious flooding several days - sometimes up to two weeks - in advance by crunching enormous amounts of data twice a day about weather, ground and river conditions.
The European Flood Alert System, or EFAS, aims to remove the element of surprise from major flooding events, according to Dr Ad de Roo, who leads the EFAS team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) at Ispra, near Milan.
Weather forecasts can predict the likely rainfall that’s coming down the track, but weather is a notoriously tricky beast, so the EFAS system hedges its bets and uses 120 forecasts from across Europe, and then looks at the variation to get a general picture.
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