MUFFINS

Edito

Floods are the first weather related disaster worldwide, expected to increase with climate change, and effective flood warning systems are crucially needed to mitigate their devastating effects. Nevertheless, performing accurate flood forecasts in terms of location, magnitude and timing of runoff and flooding, and identifying areas ”at risk”, i.e. prone to trigger fatalities and economic losses, remains a key challenge especially for Mediterranean convective rainfall event. The development of suitable flood forecasting systems, first ones already implemented in France and worldwide, is still faced with serious challenges due to: (1) complex coupled and multi-scale physical processes; (2) lack of data and robustness especially on ungauged (often devastating) watercourses, computational limitations for high resolution accuracy over large domains and quickly evolving hydro-meteorological situations; (3) limited adequation with operational needs and risk-damages modeling.