The early warning service for heavy rainfalls and flash floods

Two national early warning services have been operationally implemented in France as a result of research undertaken in recent years. APIC, a warning service for heavy rainfall set up in 2011 by Meteo-France, issues warnings when the current rainfall exceeds climatological thresholds at the scale of a municipal territory. Vigicrues Flash, a flash flood warning service set up by the Ministry in charge of Environment in 2017, issues warnings when flood forecasts exceed reference flood quantiles (which were estimated from streamflow simulated time series using the same hydrological model) at the scale of small catchments. These two services enable crisis managers to better mitigate flood risk impacts. They are based on the same web platform for subscription, warning dissemination and hazard map display of the extreme events over the last 72 h. Several major enhancements are being implemented by the beginning of 2021: (i) the technical and ergonomic improvement of the web platform; (ii) the dissemination and communication of the warning services to intermunicipal authorities and public utility organisations involved in crisis management; (iii) the dissemination and communication of the hazard map display service to the general public; (iv) the improvement of the radar-gauge quantitative precipitation estimate used as input in the APIC service, to cover the whole french metropolitan territory; (v) the improvement of the hydrological distributed model in Vigicrues Flash ingesting the radar-gauge quantitative precipitation estimate, for better performance, robustness and an extended coverage of the flash flood warning service.