Capacity Building for Floods

EOTEC DevNet regional Working Groups on Floods held their quarterly task team meetings on October 18/19, 2023. Here is a quick overview of the discussions:

Learning About New and Improved Flood Tools: Participants learned about GloFAS 4.0 from Stefania Grimaldi of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center who also answered questions from all four regional CoPs. Watch the video of her presentation below.

More information on GloFAS:

Stefania Grimaldi’s presentation
Detailed answers to CoP questions
GloFAS website

Discussions on Early Warnings 4 All (EW4All): As EOTEC global partners (WMO, GEO, CEOS and UNOOSA) are working to advance EW4All, how could EOTEC play a supportive role? Feedback from the discussion:

EOTEC could help build awareness of the initiative:
- CoP members have varying levels of familiarity with EW4All.
- A few members (e.g., in South Africa and Nepal) have already been engaged in EW4All activities, but not many.
- Clarification needed on whether EW4All is targeting the public or responders/information systems?
EOTEC could play a knowledge-sharing role:
- Work with CoP members to link national civil protection agencies and academia to the information-sharing
- Share use cases and promote the unique value of Earth observations in EW4All, for example, in providing information in inaccessible/remote areas
- Bridge the gap between EW4All experts, community of practice and users, for example relaying information about gaps in regional and country-level data and in on-the-ground early warning experience.

Other Updates and Opportunities of Relevance to Flood Working Group Members:

New 2019 Mondego River event analysis has been published on EOTEC DevNet website. Thanks to João Fernandes of the Portuguese National Laboratory for Civil Engineering! More flood tool analyses welcome. Use this template and send to eotecdevnet@gmail.com.
The Secretariat shared a preliminary overview of 2023 activities and list of upcoming training opportunities (available in the slides for each meeting – Africa, Americas, Asia Oceania and Europe)
Flood tools tracker to be updated in 2024. Tell us how to improve this resource! Review the plan and share feedback in the Flood Working Group on our member platform.
The Americas CoP floods working group is looking for a new co-lead to collaborate with William Straka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. Please email eotecdevnet@gmail.com to volunteer or recommend a colleague. Terms of reference for the position here. Many thanks to Adrian Guzman for his 18 months of leadership.
The new drought CoP is starting work on a matrix that will inform a drought tools matrix. Please add drought tools and capacity development resources here.
Volunteers from across EOTEC’s CoP Task Teams are starting work to draft guidance on approaches to EO needs assessment. The first step is gathering resources and information. Feel free to contribute here.

If you are interested in joining future meetings of regional Flood Working Groups, please sign up HERE.

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