The government announced on Wednesday that it will ban working outside in very hot weather, and the state weather agency (Aemet) issued a high temperature warning in orange (significant risk, the second on a scale of three) or red ( extreme) activates risk, the highest). According to data provided by Aemet to this newspaper, between May and September last year, this situation occurred up to 1,084 times across the country. Viewed by commune, Andalusia was the one that accumulated the greatest number of oranges and reds with 245, followed by Extremadura with 154 and Castile-La Mancha with 144. In contrast, Ceuta and Melilla had none and less notice was registered in Asturias, with three; in Cantabria at 11; and in Murcia at 13. The worst month was, by an overwhelming margin, July with 713 notices, followed by June with 231, while there were six in May and just one in September.
More information
To calculate the number of announcements, Aemet’s climatology department “consulted and added up the announcements for each area of each municipality, day by day of each month,” explains Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the agency. However, this data does not allow us to paint a rough picture of the number of alerts that are normally activated in Spain, as they occurred during the most hellish summer on record. This number of clues is by far the highest ever recorded. His thing would be to have the average for the past five or ten years, but Aemet doesn’t currently have that information due to the complexity of gathering it.
It must also be made clear that the agency does not issue bulletins for a whole municipality or a whole province, but these are broken down by area. Jaén, for example, has four zones and all of Andalusia has 29. And to complicate matters, each of these zones has its own activation level, which is detailed in the National Adverse Meteorology Forecast Plan (Meteoalerta), which was launched in the summer was published in 2006 and has been revised eight times since then. “The thresholds that trigger the various high temperature alerts are not unique, but depend on each area, because obviously temperatures don’t behave the same way in the far north, in a mountainous area, or in the southern third, where the atmosphere is located “It’s usually much warmer, especially in summer,” explains Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the agency.
“In general, orange alerts are issued when an overshoot of 37°, 39° or 40° is expected, depending on the area; and the red wines with 38°, 40° or 44°, depending on the region. These are levels that are adapted to the climate of each region and are generally higher in the south of the peninsula,” Del Campo continues. For example, in the Cordoba landscape, it takes 38° for the yellow warning to go off, the lowest of the three Aemet traffic lights, 40° for it to turn orange and 44° for it to turn red. On the west coast of Asturias, on the other hand, it is already a yellow warning at 34°, orange at 37° and red at 40°.
Number of orange and red notices issued by Autonomous Communities by AEMET from May to September last year.AEMET
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The colors of the Aemet traffic light are based on the “danger of the severe weather phenomenon” combined with its “intensity and rarity”. Yellow, says the Aemet spokesman, represents a low risk, “but it’s advisable to be vigilant as goods and people could have some impact, particularly in certain activities,” such as exercising outdoors in the middle of the day. Orange “represents a significant hazard and it is advisable to be prepared because serious effects could already occur”, while red, whose emission “occurs only in exceptionally intense and rare phenomena”, represents an exceptional hazard and property and people could suffer very serious or even catastrophic consequences. The announcements do not last all day, but specific time slots and are issued for the current day and the following two.
And to make things even clearer, in Spain two other actors intervene in the event of a meteorological emergency: the Civil Protection and the Ministry of Health. Once Aemet’s alerts have been activated, the response is the responsibility of the autonomous civil protection agencies, which broadcast the alerts to the population, each with their own protocols and different alert levels by name, color or number. In addition, Health also issues its own heat alerts, with four levels based on health impact. The health thresholds are calculated per province and taking into account the population most at risk, so that each province has a temperature above which mortality and morbidity skyrocket. The result is gibberish for the citizen who gets lost in the different nomenclatures, in the technical details and in the noise of such a multitude of voices.
A bad seasonal forecast
If there were so many warnings last summer, it was because there were three consecutive heat waves spanning 42 days, nearly half the season, compared to the previous record of 29 days in the summer of 2015. It should be noted that that the warnings are not only related to a heat wave and that not all heat is a wave. For this phenomenon to occur, Aemet sets three thresholds for duration, intensity, and extent: “Temperatures above the 95 percent percentile of the maximum in July and August must be recorded, affect 10 percent of the stations, and persist for at least three days.” Therefore, can it get very hot in a day and trigger warnings.
But the fact that last summer was awful and that the extreme heat set in as early as April doesn’t mean it will be. Is it expected to be the same, worse, or better than the previous one? Although it is impossible to predict certain events, such as heat waves, in the long term, meteorological models are capable of making seasonal forecasts that provide probabilistic information related to temperature, at which point they reach their highest level of reliability. This summer, the seasonal forecast gives “a pretty strong signal that there is a high probability that it will be warmer than normal.” In the west of the peninsula it is between 60 and 70% and in the rest of Spain between 70 and 100%. That “likelihood is quite high, similar to what was seen in forecasts for this data last summer,” Del Campo laments.
Moreover, the probability that it is among the worst, d , even in points of the Balearic and Canary Islands is 70% or 100%. “In early May, forecasts point to another very hot summer, but we have no way of knowing if it will be as hot as last year,” concludes the Aemet spokesman.