The director of the Western Canary Islands Center of the National Institute of Meteorology, Victor Quintero, stated this Tuesday that the excess of weather alerts in past years caused that, in the case of tropical storm Delta, "we were not able to point out to people the quantification of the phenomenon". Therefore, among other things, the INM is launching today a National Plan, called Meteoalerta, with which it will accustom citizens to ‘yellow, orange and red' alerts in adverse phenomena.
"One of the purposes we pursue with Meteoalerta is not to be launching warnings continuously, which causes either people not to be alerted or not to be able to really quantify the alert of what is coming", something that happened in his opinion with the tropical storm that generated chaos at the end of November last year, Quintero said during the presentation of the plan, which was attended by the Government Delegate, José Segura.
In fact, Quintero explained that during the year 2005, about 300 warnings were launched in the province of Las Palmas and a similar amount, although slightly lower, in the province of Tenerife. In 2006, only in the province of Las Palmas, 60 warnings have been launched, which correspond to between 6 and 8 'real' adverse phenomena, since the warnings are updated several times a day and a warning is also launched when the risk ends.
The new ‘Meteoalerta' zones the Canary Islands territory much more, avoids provincial warnings and counts up to 15 different zones in the Canary Islands to be able to specify where the alert for adverse phenomena will really be, instead of doing it simply by provinces as it was done until now. From now on, a scale of four colors (green, yellow, orange and red) will allow you to know what the risk situation is in the face of adverse phenomena, which can be verified day by day through the INM website.
The green level indicates absence of risk, the yellow level highlights that there are already variables that border on the thresholds of danger for some sectors, the orange level will already pose a danger due to adverse phenomena and the red level already implies "a very important danger".
As Quintero explained, from now on semi-automatic warnings will only be launched in the case of orange and red alerts. The INM's estimate is that there will be no more than 3 or 4 orange alerts per year, and that in the case of red alerts (the last precedent of a ‘red' alert was the Delta storm), it is most likely that they will not occur more than once every three or four years.
The third of the alerts, the yellow one, will not involve any warning to the population, but it will be warned, mainly in the case of alerts for strong winds, to people who may be interested in being warned, such as farmers.
There will be, Quintero explained, a greater connection with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, in addition to special warnings for tropical storms, in the event that they reach the Archipelago. There will be, he said, two forecasts throughout the day.
The objective of Meteoalerta, said Quintero, is that weather alerts "are more accessible to understand for society", while always being "in close collaboration with Civil Protection".
ACN Press
