Flood forecasting and warning on the River Rhine

The River Rhine has its source in the glaciers of the Swiss mountains and e ventually flows to the flat-lands of The Netherlands. The course of the riv er can be split into six major morphological sections within different clim atological regions. This heterogeneity (in the hydrological sense) is refle cted in twenty-five flood-warning centres along the Rhine and its tributari es. There is one flood-warning centre in Switzerland, one in France, three in Germany and one in The Netherlands. This paper describes the organisatio n and responsibilities of the German flood-warning centres. The Federal Institute of Hydrology provides the German centres at Mainz and Duisburg with forecast results. These results were obtained by a statistic al multichannel filtering model between 1980 and 1997. Commencing in 1998, a new forecasting system has been in use, which is built up by hydrodynamic models for the most important river reaches, coupled with statistical appr oaches for some input gauges. The implementation and data usage of this new system is discussed and forecast results for the 1993, 1995 and the 1998 f loods are presented. Finally, the paper provides an outlook on the linking with precipitation-runoff models.