The Government announced on Wednesday that it will prohibit working outdoors when the heat is very intense and the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) has activated a warning for high temperatures orange (significant risk, the second on a scale of three) or red (extreme risk, the highest). According to the data provided by Aemet to this newspaper, this situation occurred up to 1,084 times at some point in the country from May to September of last year. By communities, the one that accumulated the greatest number of oranges and reds was Andalusia, with 245, followed by Extremadura, with 154, and Castilla-La Mancha, with 144. In contrast, in Ceuta and Melilla there were none and where fewer notices registered was in Asturias, with three; in Cantabria, with 11; and in Murcia, with 13. The worst month, by overwhelming difference, was July, with 713 notices, followed by June, with 231, while there were six in May and only one in September.
To calculate the number of notices, Aemet’s Climatology department “has consulted day by day of each month the notices for each area of each community and they have been added up,” explains Rubén del Campo, spokesperson for the agency. However, these data do not allow us to draw an approximate portrait of the number of warnings that are usually activated in Spain, since they occurred in the most hellish summer since there are records. Thus, this number of notices is, by far, the highest recorded so far. His thing would be to have the average of the last five or 10 years, but Aemet at the moment does not have this information due to the complexity involved in collecting it.
It must also be clarified that the agency does not launch notices for an entire community, nor for an entire province, but these are divided by areas. For example, Jaén has four zones and all of Andalucía has 29. And, to make things even more complicated, each of the areas has its own level of activation, detailed in the National Adverse Meteorology Prediction Plan (Meteoalerta), which was born in the summer of 2006 and has been revised eight times since then. “The thresholds that trigger the different warnings for high temperatures are not unique, but they depend on each areabecause obviously the temperatures do not behave in the same way in the extreme north, in a mountainous area or in the southern third, where the environment is usually much warmer, especially in summer”, explains Rubén del Campo, spokesperson for the agency.
“In general terms, orange notices are issued when it is expected that 37°, 39° or 40° will be exceeded, depending on the area; and the reds, with 38º, 40 or 44º also depending on the area. They are levels adapted to the climate of each region and in general they are higher towards the south of the Peninsula”, deepens Del Campo. Thus, in the Cordovan countryside it takes 38° for the yellow warning to be launched, the lowest of the three existing in the Aemet traffic light, 40° for it to change to orange and 44° for it to reach red. On the other hand, on the western coast of Asturias with 34° it is already a yellow warning, with 37° orange and with 40°, red.
What affects the most is what happens closer. To not miss anything, subscribe.
subscribe
The colors of the Aemet traffic light depend on the “danger posed by the adverse weather phenomenon”, associated with its “intensity and royalty”. Yellow, says the Aemet spokesman, poses a low risk, “but it is advisable to be vigilant because goods and people could suffer some impacts, especially in certain activities” such as playing sports outdoors in the middle of the day. Orange “represents a significant danger and it is advisable to be prepared, as serious impacts could already occur”, while red, whose emission occurs “only in the event of extraordinarily intense and infrequent phenomena”, represents an extraordinary danger and property and people could suffer very serious or even catastrophic impacts. loa visos no last all day, but certain time slots and are issued for the current day and the following two.
And to curl the loop even more, in Spain two other actors intervene in a meteorological emergency: Civil Protection and the Ministry of Health. Once the notices are activated by Aemet, the response is the responsibility of the autonomous Civil Protections, which are the ones that launch the alerts to the population, each one with their protocols and alert levels different by names, colors, or numbers. In addition, Health also issues its own heat alerts, with four levels depending on their impact on health. The Health thresholds are calculated by province and taking into account the most vulnerable population, so each one has a temperature from which mortality and morbidity skyrocket. The result is gibberish for the citizen, who gets lost in the disparate nomenclatures, in the technical details and in the noise generated by such a multitude of voices.
A bad seasonal prediction
If there were so many notices last summer, it’s because three consecutive heat waves were registered that covered 42 days, almost half of the season, compared to the previous record of 29 days in the summer of 2015. It must be nuanced that the warnings are not produced only in the context of a heat wave and that all heat is not a wave. For this phenomenon to occur, Aemet establishes three thresholds of duration, intensity and extension: “temperatures above the 95% percentile of the maximum in July and August must be recorded, affect 10% of the stations and last at least three days”. Therefore, it can be very hot one day and trigger warnings.
But the fact that last summer was terrible and that the extreme heat has already arrived in April do not determine that this will be so too. Is it expected to be the same, worse or better than the previous one? Although it is impossible to forecast specific events, such as heat waves, in the long term, weather models are capable of pointing to seasonal predictions, which provide probabilistic information in terms of temperature and which at this time reach their highest degree of reliability. This summer, the seasonal forecast “gives a fairly robust signal that it will be warmer than normal with a high probability.” It ranges between 60 and 70% in the west of the Peninsula and between 70 and 100% in the rest of Spain. This “probability is quite high, similar to what was seen for last summer in the forecasts for these dates,” laments Del Campo.
Going further, the probability that it is among the worst, that is, that it has temperatures similar to the 20% of the warmest in the reference period (1993 to 2016), is “also quite high”, around 50 to 70% and, even, in points of the Balearic and Canary Islands amounts to 70% or 100%. “At the beginning of May, the forecasts speak of a new very hot summer, again, what we cannot know is if it will be as hot as last year,” concludes the Aemet spokesperson.
#year #orange #red #notices #activated #Spain #September