Getting data about weather condition in Bulgaria a month in advance has proven almost impossible. A day after Disaster Management Minister Emel Etem warned that river beds had not been cleared and a flood crisis was possible given the warm weather and spring melting of the snow, The Sofia Echo tried to find information on weather condition for the next two months.

First stop was the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. "It is difficult to predict the weather for more than a 15-day period. We could prepare a report, if you come up with the questions, but it will require time," Latin Latinov, head of the institute's short and long-term forecast department, said.

Konstantin Tsankov, head of the institute, said calculating the expected amount of snowmelt was no simple thing and depended on a lot of factors such as snow density, wind conditions and the topology of the landscape. "It is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive procedure and we would need details like the exact region you are interested in and the time period. You should come to the office and submit your enquiry. We have to make on-site inspections and measurements."

Private weather forecast company TV-MET predictably had a more commercially orientated approach. The head of the company, Petar Yankov, said he could provide a forecast if The Sofia Echo was prepared to pay for it.

With weather men unable to provide a long-range forecast, The Sofia Echo turned to Etem's ministry, which in July last year opened a high-tech Aerospace Observation Centre. The centre has the task of monitor events in case of disasters.

"To be honest anyone who gives a weather forecast for more than a month in advance would be doing it based on statistical data, which could be incorrect," Emil Ivanov from the National Service for Civil Protection within Etem's ministry said.

"Meteorologists often joke that such a forecast has a 50 per cent chance of being correct. If we know, for instance, that the average amount of rainfall in Bulgaria is so many litres a sq m and if it has not much rained during January and February, we might expect a fair amount of rainfall in March, particularly given that March and April are the rainiest period of the year, according to statistics. But, this prediction could be wrong," he concluded.

From all that was said, it became clear that it is not easy to get a long-term weather forecast unless one was prepared to pay for it or had time to schedule an appointment. And even then, the forecast was not likely to be accurate.

At the moment, all Bulgarians can only hope is that there will not be another flood crisis this spring.

Since 2005 floods have claimed tens of lives and caused damage of millions of leva. In all cases the authorities claimed that it was the incredibly bad weather and the way riverbeds and dams had been maintained that caused the disasters.

Despite the condition of riverbeds being blamed for the disasters, the situation there was no more promising than the attempts to get a weather forecast. On February 26, Green Balkans, an environmental NGO, sent an open letter claiming that instead of cleaning river beds, authorities were cutting trees along the rivers for commercial purposes. Green Balkans gave the example of Chepelarska (Chaya) River in Rhodope Mountain. "Cutting down trees near, but not in, the rivers created a large risk of soil erosion and the flooding of riverbanks and roads," the letter said.