EU Flood risk maps at high resolution

The European Flood Alert System (EFAS) monitors flood risk across Europe. The OEMC project will develop 1 km resolution flood risk maps, updated yearly, based on the two main drivers of extreme flood risk: soil moisture and precipitation.

What is the challenge?

Barely there is data of flood susceptibility including ancillary information about the factors influencing the vulnerability at different times of the year and across scales (from continental to the local scale). Therefore it is necessary to jointly evaluate multiple remote sensing available datasets of precipitation, physical land characteristics, drainage density and others to provide maps of regions susceptibility to floods with their categorization to facilitate the risk mitigation activities of current and potential new users of flood maps.

Our solution

We propose to develop high resolution (<1 km) flood risk maps, updated yearly, exploiting the two main drivers of flood occurrence in Europe, i.e., soil moisture and precipitation plus ancillary information through machine learning approaches (e.g., random forest).

Who will benefit?

Civil protection agencies, water resource management organizations, researchers, municipalities, insurance companies, and the European Flood Alert System will benefit from this use.