On CEMS-Flood, a number of river location for monitoring and evaluating the system. They are also referred to as diagnostic points. There are few categories of these stations, depending on the available information and the type of use of these stations. These are briefly described below.

Diagnostic points

CEMS-Flood 'diagnostic points' describes a set of river locations distributed across the CEMS-Flood domain to provide an overview of CEMS-Flood behaviour. They include catchments for which the CEMS-Flood team has river discharge observations, or catchments requested by users to be monitored on the web interface (GloFAS only), but excluding points with insufficient or uncertain metadata information, or that cannot be represented onto the model river network. For GloFAS, they also include 'synthetic points' selected by the CEMS-Flood team to provide a comprehensive geographical distribution across the world. Synthetic points are not associated with any metadata, such as station name or a provider.

As more observational data or user-defined points are made available to GloFAS, synthetic points are progressively being replaced with catchments that has station names and often also observations. 

Fixed reporting points

The so-called 'fixed reporting points' are CEMS-Flood diagnostic points excluding synthetic points for GloFAS. These fixed reporting points are used to monitor the CEMS-Flood system through the interactive map-viewer layer 'Reporting Points'. These points always appear on the CEMS-Flood mapviewers as reporting points, therefore the name 'fixed'. They are shown as grey square marker if no flood are present and changed to a flood marker (coloured symbols) when flood conditions are forecasted for that station.

Dynamic reporting points

Dynamic reporting points are generated in flooded areas where no fixed reporting points are available to provide extra information. These points can be located anywhere on the CEMS-Flood river network and therefore they will not have some associated metadata, like the station name, the provided coordinates and the provided upstream area. However, these stations will still have the coordinate of the model river pixel (latitude and longitue) and the CEMS-Flood upstream area. The location of these dynamic reporting points is determined following a complex algorithm, which is described in CEMS-Flood reporting points and dynamic point generation algorithm.