European Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (ETN-R)
...in support of EFAS and EC-JRC
River Basins relevant for ETN-R, Status: December 2008
The European Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (ETN-R) is an information infrastructure for the automated collection, quality control and redistribution of near real-time river discharge and water level data from 30 European national and trans-boundary river basins, involving in total 35 countries. The results of the project will primarily improve the forecasts of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) research project conducted at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC). Many of the achievements made during the three year project (2006-2008) will contribute to the GRDC project Global Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (GTN-R).
At the end of the project in December 2008, 43 providers have given a formal or informal agreement to support ETN‑R and EFAS by providing their real-time data, covering the vast majority of stations relevant for EFAS (91%). This shows an enormous acceptance and approval all over Europe towards both EFAS and the collection of real-time data to support EFAS through the ETN‑R project. The large majority of the hydrological services have already put a significant amount of time and work into supporting this project. This includes workshop participation, work in relation to the metadata provision, station selection and efforts to start data transfer. They have invested a considerable amount of time in the ETN‑R project, even if they have not been able to start data transfer yet. Some hydrological services have shown an interest in the potential of the ETN‑R system to be used as data exchange system between national hydrological services. In this way EFAS and ETN‑R can provide additional benefit to the hydrological services beyond early flood warning on a national scale.
The results achieved in the initial project and the broad positive feedback by the national hydrological services have led to the continuation of the work in a follow-up project.