CEMS-flood use 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.

Fixed reporting points

The so-called 'fixed reporting points' are locations that provide an overview of the EFAS or GloFAS 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, but excluding points with insufficient or uncertain metadata information, or those stations that cannot be represented on the model river network.

The fixed reporting points are used in monitoring the hydrological systems through the 'Reporting Points' and 'Sub-seasonal and Seasonal Outlook' layers in the interactive map-viewer. These points always appear on the map-viewer as reporting points, therefore the name 'fixed'. They are shown in the medium-range forecasts as grey square markers (or blue in EFAS where post-processing information is available), if no flood is present, and are changed to a flood marker (coloured symbols) when flood conditions are forecasted for that station. The fixed reporting points are also used in the sub-seasonal and seasonal layers, where they will always appear as grey rectangles, regardless of the forecast conditions.

Dynamic reporting points

Dynamic reporting points are generated specifically in the medium-range systems to indicate flood conditions in areas where no fixed reporting points are available to provide extra information. These points can be located anywhere on the CEMS-flood river networks 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 in detail here: CEMS-Flood reporting points and dynamic point generation algorithm.

Basin-representative reporting points

The CEMS-flood sub-seasonal and seasonal products show the forecast information for pre-defined basins, where the forecast signal is aggregated spatially. To allow all areas to be represented with detailed information (i.e hydrographs), even if no fixed reporting point is available, for each basin a single representative station is defined. These are shown on the web with black circles, while the fixed points appear with the usual grey rectangles. For further details on the basins and the basin-representative points please go to: CEMS-flood sub-seasonal and seasonal basins and representative stations.