ECMWF hosted the 4th meeting of the Global Flood Working group from 4 to 6 March 2014.
Description
Each year, floods cause devastating losses and damage across the world. Growing populations in ill-planned flood prone coastal and riverine areas are increasingly exposed to more extreme rainfall events. With more population and economic assets at risk, governments, banks, international development and relief agencies, and private firms are investing in flood reduction measures. However, in many countries, the flood risk is not managed optimally because of lack of scientific data and methods or a communication gap between science and risk managers.
The Global Flood Working Group is a multi-disciplinary group of scientists, operational agencies and flood risk managers focused on developing efficient and effective global flood tools that can address these challenges. The goals of the group are:
- to develop and improve global flood forecasting and monitoring systems;
- to deploy these systems in a global flood observatory tracking floods in near real-time;
- to build a global flood record suitable for flood risk assessment;
- to make these tools available to organizations and countries that need them.
The aim of this year’s meeting was to build a Global Flood Partnership and to structure the many ongoing work and initiatives in a coordinated manner to develop prototype products and services useful for national hydro-meteorological services and international emergency response agencies.
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