On February 26 to 28th 2018, a successful workshop was organized at the office of the Republic Hydrometeorological Service of Serbia (RHMZ), Belgrade. The event marked the successful completion of the project milestone concerned with the first release of the Sava FFWS, which is the starting point for a 6-month period of pre-operational testing.

The major goal of the first pre-release had been to build a first operational client-server application which contains all GIS and real time data connections in the Sava River basin, while the purpose of the second phase was to include all operational hydrological and hydraulic models. The third prerelease included the remaining extensions of the Sava FFWS to become ready for testing prior to reach the first official release 1.0 which will be used for operational testing, since all the backup and archive and the web servers are now in place.

Activities during the phase
The release 1.0 included the remaining extensions of the Sava FFWS. During January and February, 2018, the Consultant was able to perform the installation of the hardware and software for hosting of the backup servers at AVP Sava, RHMZ and DHMZ. Web and archive servers have been installed at the ISRBC. The IT staff has been trained in monitoring and troubleshooting of the various hardware and software components. The Sava FFWS has now the required 4 hosts, while all of them have been configured to be in full synchronization. Thanks to support of the AVP Sava, a temporary license for the Mike11 software was made for running Mike models till the end of March at the servers, hosted at AVP Sava.

The training workshop participants and other users of the system are requested to come forward with their experiences and suggestions for improving and making the system even more useful for their operations. To enable this, the Consultant has set up a discussion forum at the Sava Portal (https://sava.deltares.nl) for the scope of the project implementation. This portal and its forum are closed for unauthorized access.

During the workshop, the Consultant strongly suggested the participants to register at the international HEPEX website www.hepex.org. HEPEX stands for Hydrological Ensemble Prediction EXperiment and is an active community of hydrological forecasters and researchers.

Next activities

From now on, the six month pre-operational testing period has started. In this period the nominated staff members for real-time operations, support & maintenance and system developments will be trained in two rounds (March and June), while they continuously will work with the system. This testing period is meant to test the various features of the Sava FFWS but also to experience the procedures and organization of these activities. As such, the input of the forecasting organizations is a key element to the success of the next phase.

To ensure efficient communication and support, the Consultant proposed at the IWG-6 meeting to organize every two weeks a webinar. Both the IWG members and the participants of the workshop endorsed this proposal. It was agreed to organize these webinars on the Wednesday afternoon from 13:00-15:00, starting at March 14th, 2018. During the webinars there is time for questions and answers, identification of issues, how to's and sharing of lessons learned.

Conclusion

The milestone of the first release in the Sava FFWS project has been reached successfully.

Melting Snow Causes Floods in Bosnia

Afther the recent snowfall in Bosnia and Herzegovina started to melt quickly, river levels began to rise in the north of the country, causing floods in the towns of Bihac and Cazin.

Display of the Sava FFWS Operator Client application, showing the alarms as a result of the flooding during extreme snow melting in March 2018

Additional information
For questions or remarks, you may contact Mirza Sarac (msarac@savacommission.org) or Klaas-Jan van Heeringen (Deltares, Klaas-Jan.vanHeeringen@deltares.nl).