New nationwide flood forecasting system for Germany

A new Online Flood Forecasting Service for Germany has recently been launched. The service includes at present forecasting of river flow at approximately 200 locations on Danube, Elbe, Rhine, Oder and Weser rivers and on their major tributaries. Updated 48 hour forecasts are issued hourly.

The forecasting system has been implemented in close cooperation with Meteomedia, who supply the meteorological data used as input to the hydrological model in MIKE 11. The model is used to calculate inflow to the river network from 585 sub-catchments. The setup includes modelling of 15,000 km river with 100 river branches located in the entire river-basin areas.

Up to time of forecast, the hydrological model uses hourly input of precipitation and temperature collected from the more than 1500 real time Meteomedia station network.