GloFAS uses a number of river locations, the so-called reporting points, for monitoring and evaluating the system. 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

GloFAS 'diagnostic points' describes a set of river locations distributed across the world to provide an overview of GloFAS behaviour. They include catchments for which the GloFAS team has river discharge observations, or catchments requested by users to be monitored on the web interface, but excluding points with insufficient or uncertain metadata information, or that cannot be represented onto the model river network. They also include 'synthetic points' selected by the GloFAS 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 going to be progressively replaced with catchments that has station names and often also observations.

In December 2022, GloFAS had 6035 diagnostic points, of which 3159 were 'synthetic points'.

Fixed reporting points

The so-called 'fixed reporting points' are GloFAS reporting points across the world that an overview of GloFAS behaviour.

They include catchments for which the GloFAS team has river discharge observations, or catchments requested by users to be monitored on the web interface, but excluding points with insufficient or uncertain metadata information, or those stations cannot be represented onto the model river network.

The fixed reporting points are used to monitor the GloFAS system through the interactive map-viewer layer 'Reporting Points'. These points always appear on the GloFAS mapviewer as reporting points, therefore the name 'fixed'. They are shown as grey square markers on the 30-day forecast layer if no flood are present and changed to a flood marker (coloured symbols) when flood conditions are forecasted for that station. Fixed reporting points are also used in the sub-seasonal and seasonal products, where they will always appear as grey rectangles, regardless of the forecast conditions.

In December 2022 GloFAS had 2876 fixed reporting points.

Dynamic reporting points

Dynamic reporting points are generated specifically in the 30-day system in flooded areas where no fixed reporting points are available to provide extra information. These points can be located anywhere on the GloFAS river network and therefore they will not have some of the normally provided associated metadata, such as the station name, the provided coordinates and the provided upstream area. However, these stations will still have the coordinates of the model river pixel (latitude and longitude) and the GloFAS river network upstream area. The location of these dynamic reporting points is determined following a complex algorithm, which is described below.