A widely used land surface model, the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model, is coupled with a newly developed hierarchical dominant river tracing-based runoff-routing model to form the Dominant river tracing-Routing Integrated with VIC Environment (DRIVE) model, which serves as the new core of the real-time Global Flood Monitoring System (GFMS). The GFMS uses real-time satellite-based precipitation to derive flood monitoring parameters for the latitude band 50°N–50°S at relatively high spatial (~12 km) and temporal (3 hourly) resolution. Examples of model results for recent flood events are computed using the real-time GFMS. To evaluate the accuracy of the new GFMS, the DRIVE model is run retrospectively for 15 years using both research-quality and real-time satellite precipitation products. Evaluation results are slightly better for the research-quality input and significantly better for longer duration events (3 day events versus 1 day events). Basins with fewer dams tend to provide lower false alarm ratios. For events longer than three days in areas with few dams, the probability of detection is ~0.9 and the false alarm ratio is ~0.6. In general, these statistical results are better than those of the previous system. Streamflow was evaluated at 1121 river gauges across the quasi-global domain. Validation using real-time precipitation across the tropics (30°S–30°N) gives positive daily Nash-Sutcliffe Coefficients for 107 out of 375 (28%) stations with a mean of 0.19 and 51% of the same gauges at monthly scale with a mean of 0.33. There were poorer results in higher latitudes, probably due to larger errors in the satellite precipitation input.