Programme details

Vulnerability to floods has increased drastically in Europe. In 2002 alone, France, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic suffered from exceptional flooding.
This raises a series of questions.
The European Commission has financed more than 55 projects in response to these questions, four of which will help better confine floods.

EUROTAS

This project includes 15 partners from all over Europe. The objective is to create a methodology for managing and assessing the risk of floods.
Eurotas looked at the various components of flood risks. Some of these assess the human side of risk, together with the effects of changes in climate and land use, plus river engineering.
The management tool resulting from the project can help authorities determine where to evacuate people in order to save lives and tell the authorities where to focus the relief measures to keep a flood under control.

SPHERE

The objective of another project called SPHERE- grouping six European partners plus one from Israel and one from Canada is to have a look at the past to get a perspective of historical climate changes and major floods.
With the SPHERE project, records back further in time are taken into account in order to better predict future floods by means of data on floods that occurred in the past.
The idea is to understand the cyclical nature and variability of events that took place in the past.

EURAINSAT

The goal of the EURAINSAT project that unites 7 European partners is to monitor rainfall from space. On 28 August 2002, an Ariane rocket took off from Kourou, French Guyana, carrying a new generation weather satellite dubbed Meteosat MSG that is opening up new perspectives.
The Meteosat second generation improves our information on clouds and rainfall. It is crucial to distinguish clouds that mean a high level of rainfall from those with a lower rate, to get a better estimate by satellite and better input for flood prediction.
This is now possible thanks to a new type of sensor on board the MSG.

MUSIC

These satellite data are particularly useful for the MUSIC project, a group of ten European partners whose assignment is to provide forecasts.
MUSIC uses three types of precipitation measurements. Firstly, weather satellite measurements, which cover a large territory. Then, MUSIC works at land level by ground-based weather radar over a smaller territory. Finally, the project also uses rain gauges for ultra accurate data at fixed points.
The problem these researchers have solved is that of integrating the three types of measurement which result in an overall measurement of greater accuracy that is used in a distributed hydrological model, enabling us to make terrestrial forecasts with much less uncertainty than before.

Conclusion

Scientists realise that it is not possible to avoid floods entirely, but thanks to MUSIC and the other three European projects, they are doing everything possible to reduce the risks.