**Flood early warning systems (FEWS) play a vital role in safeguarding lives, minimizing damage, and promoting resilience in flood-prone areas. Their main benefits include:**
-**Reducing Fatalities:** These systems provide timely alerts, allowing people to evacuate to safer areas before a flood hits. Lives can be saved by ensuring that residents receive warnings well in advance.
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Because raw radar data estimates represent rain in the air, these data can be combined with on-the-ground rainfall observations to be more representative of the water hitting the ground. <br>
Rainfall fields provided by radars, either with or without calibration, provide information about the recent weather. For warning it is important to also obtain information of the future weather. **Nowcasting** achieves this by projecting the movement of rainfall cells for several hours into the future. Realistically, nowcasts are usually only sufficiently accurate for the use by FEWS for 30 minutes to 1 hour into the future, and less so for thunderstorm (convective) rain.
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**Providing warnings** to the impacted population, either directly or indirectly via collaborating agencies, is the most crucial step in flood early warning. This can be done by the institution operating a FEWS, or by other emergency management authorities. Warnings are often distributed via sirens, text-messages, or lately via social media with the goal of informing the impacted population and stakeholders of the imminent threat and providing guidance on how to react.<br>
_**Fig.2:** Screenshots of the Demonstrator used in CapTain Rain. Different Precipitation datasets are integrated, alarm thresholds can be set by the users._
