Heavy rain and convective storms trigger a number of different natural hazards (floods, landslides, debris flows…) that have impacts on people’s life and goods throughout Europe and across borders. Although the policies for emergency management and response are turning to a more adapted risk management approach, Civil Protection agencies still face multiple challenges hampering their active decisions, including absence of multi-hazard forecasts or difficulty in translating hazards forecasts in impact-based decisions, or the coordination between emergency management authorities during extreme and/or large-scale events affecting multiple regions and countries. In this context, integrating advanced multi-hazard impact-based forecasts in the currently existing Early Warning Systems (capitalizing on the advances in hazard observation and forecasts and vulnerability and exposure datasets) is key for improved emergency management leading to disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. The EDERA Project inherits the results from previous UCPM projects ERICHA, SMUFF, and TAMIR for seamless forecasting of heavy rainfall and flash flood impacts and aims at using the river flood forecasting component from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) to propose an improved strategy for compound flood impact forecasts over Europe, combining convective hazards and pluvial floods and river floods. The developed strategy will be demonstrated in real-time during 15 months at two levels: (1) at the European scale, evaluating the performance of the impact forecasts in cooperation with the stakeholders of the project (with this aim, the products will be further integrated in EFAS), and (2) in two pilot sites (Spain-Portugal and Finland+), where the Early Warning Systems of the operational end users (involved in the project as partners and stakeholders) will be improved integrating the developed EDERA flood impact forecasts in real-time to assess their usefulness for improved cross-border cooperation and coordination among the relevant authorities (at national and regional scales). The integration of these impact forecasts in the EFAS, which provides direct support to the DG-ECHO ERCC will ensure their availability beyond the duration of the project.

There are six beneficiaries in the project: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI, FI), the Ministerio del Interior (ESMIR, ES), the Autoridade Nacional de Emergencia e Proteçao Civil (ANEPC, PT), together with the coordinator Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, ES)

Additionally, EDERA counts with the direct participation of 3 end users as partners of the consortium: ANEPC and DGPCE (national CPAs of Portugal and Spain and members of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, UCPM), and AMAYA (with responsibilities in flood emergency management in the region of Andalusia, Spain). 

The project is an extension of the former projects HAREN, EDHIT, ERICHA, SMUFF, and TAMIR.