¶ GFM data on EFAS
The European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) is the flood service of the European Commission's Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS), an operational system monitoring and forecasting floods across the pan-European domain (see below).
GFM's products are made available within the EFAS Map Viewer.
To access the Map Viewer and be allowed to visualise the products in real time, users are requested to become EFAS partners (terms and conditions of the association agreement are available at https://www.efas.eu/en/become-efas-partner)
Once registered, the MapViewer can be accessed by typing the account details in the following form:
¶ GFM Health Status
Information about the overall health state of the GFM service is also presented to the user within EFAS Map Viewer. An “alert sign” in the top menu, positioned on the right, next to the user profile indicates the health state of the service. The alert sign is colour coded:
- “Green”: Service up and running.
- “Amber”: Service degraded.
- “Red”: Service not available.
Detailed information about the health state of the various components of the service can be retrieved by clicking on the “alert sign”. This will open a pop-up window onto the map viewer presenting the latest registered alert notifications as shown below. The different alert notifications are organised by Group providing details about the current Status, a Message describing the alert notification and a Date indicating when the alert was raised. The column Group in the window refers to the individual components of the service. Four service components / groups are defined (see below) which will be outlined hereafter:
The group Sentinel1 Datastream comprises alerts in respect to any required Sentinel-1 data used to deduce the various layers provided by the service. One major alert event in this group is the Copernicus Services Data Hub acting as reference for all the Sentinel-1 input data used in the service. Downtimes of the Copernicus Services Data Hub as well as issues in receiving the required data will be notified within this group. Furthermore, observed issues in respect to the performed pre-processing of Sentinel-1 data will be alerted, because the pre-processed data is the main input data stream to deduce flood information.
Alert notifications in respect to the production of the individual GFM layers is provided within the group GFM Production. Any observed issues within the actual production system of GFM are forwarded within this group. Anomalies detected in the processing workflow of the flood layers as well as non-availabilities of components of the production system are covered in this notification group as well as the monitoring of the interface towards to the GFM dissemination system.
The GFM dissemination system is responsible to provide access to produced GFM layers. End user entry points the GFM layers are provided by a WMS-T server as well as a dedicated Web Application (portal). Degradations or the unavailability of those will be reported within this group.
Finally, the API Health group depicts alerts in respect to the developed RESTful APIs. The RESTful APIs are a backend system of high importance connecting the GFM production and dissemination system. In addition, the APIs allow for machine-to-machine communication to enable push notifications via Twitter.
¶ How to browse GFM products in EFAS Map Viewer
Once logged in, GFM's products are listed in the top bar under the “GFM” menu (red rectangle), as shown below
Each layer can be visualized by moving the toggle to the “on” position once done the selected layer will be added to the dynamic layer list on the right side on the screen, as shown below:
In the following example, the Observed Flood Extent layer is switched on: EFAS Map Viewer will then display the Sentinel-1 tiles for which GFM has detected flood-covered areas:
¶ Areas of interest
GFM-registered users are also offered the possibility to draw their own areas of interest (AOIs): upon clicking on the “GFM” icon, as shown below:
The system will display a first sub-menu (see graphic below) offering the user the possibility of selecting:
- the list of the designed AOIs
- the list of the notification for the AOIs as set in the Web Application
This “Area of Interest” menu allows the users to visualize the list of the user-defined AOIs, as shown below:
To the right of each AOI's name, the system allows:
- to display the boundaries of the AOI (eye-shaped icon)
- to hide the boundaries of the AOI (barred eye-shaped icon)
- to modify the boundaries of the AOI (pencil&sheet, this function will redirect the user to the Web Application)
Above the list of the available AOIs, users are offered the chance to design the AOIs of their choice directly through GloFAS, as shown below:
- Blue square: Design an AOI.
- Red eraser: Delete the AOI.
- Green floppy disc: Save the AOI.
When the latter icon is pressed, the system will display a form users must fill out to save the AOI and display the available GFM's product output layers, as shown below.
¶ Floods notifications
Users have the chance to be notified any time a new GFM's product output layer is available for a specific AOI upon proper configuration of the notification setup through the Web Application.
Once done, flood notifications are displayed on EFAS as well through the menu shown below:
When users click on a notification, the system will display all newly available product output layers.
These can then be downloaded in a bundle by pressing the leftward arrow icon (red rectangle), as shown below:
The system will then open a pop-up window allowing the users to download the aggregate .zip file (containing all the product output layer, in TIFF format), by pressing the downward arrow in the red rectangle, as shown below:
