In stores, bus stops or in a taxi, it is one of the star topics: the weather. These days it is not difficult to hear anyone say that "the weather is crazy", and it is that the usually calm climate of the Canary Islands is giving way to an almost continuous weather alert situation in recent months.
The significant increase in the number of weather alerts for wind and rain, mostly, has been the subject of criticism by those who consider the precaution of the civil protection authorities to be excessive. On the other hand, the "temperance" of the National Institute of Meteorology in the islands, in the detection and prediction of the tropical storm Delta that devastated the archipelago last November, has generated complaints about the lack of resources of the INM in the Canary Islands to improve its predictions.
"When the alert is true, no one will believe us"
In the government control session held in the Senate last Wednesday, March 8, the senator of the Canarian Coalition for Tenerife, Ricardo Melchior Navarro, questioned the Minister of the Environment Cristina Narbona, about "the suitability of the instruments for monitoring and detecting adverse weather phenomena that the National Institute of Meteorology has in the Canary Community". According to Melchior, the pre-alerts and alerts issued by the INM throughout 2005 have differed too often from what has happened later and he believes that the institutions cannot give either the information, or the protection and security that citizens need.
Melchior argued that so many alerts and pre-alerts generate uncertainty in the population and "like in the story of the wolf, we give the alert so many times and then it is false that, when the real wolf comes, no one pays attention and the damage occurs". In this way, he introduced the controversial alert declaration of November 28, 2005, after the INM predicted very strong winds in the Canary Islands. Specifically, it was predicted that the winds would reach 90 kilometers in Lanzarote and 130 kilometers per hour were recorded at the airport. In the case of Tenerife, the mistake was much greater, the 150 kilometers per hour predicted four hours before the Delta, were actually 250 on the summits. Material damage to homes, infrastructure, crops and a part of the Canarian population without electricity supply was the balance left by the tropical storm.
Before the interpellation of the Canarian Senator, the minister has announced the creation of a specialized unit in subtropical and tropical meteorology, in collaboration with the National Hurricane Center of the United States, located in Miami. This unit will allow progress in the prediction of meteorological phenomena such as the Delta, until now unknown, but which are beginning to occur more and more frequently due to the alterations of the climate system that we are experiencing. The unit will have as one of its bases of operations the Izaña Observatory on the island of Tenerife, which, according to Minister Narbona, "is a center of reference at an international level".
Apparently, the first steps have already been taken for the creation of this specialized unit. As a first activity, a seminar was held in Madrid last week in which, among other meteorology scholars, Doctor Ávila, one of the directors of the National Hurricane Center of the United States, participated.
"Politicians have no idea"
Fortunato Benito Regidor, Director of the Meteorological Center of Eastern Canary Islands, attended this seminar. For Benito, the interpellation of Senator Ricardo Melchior is the result of the "total ignorance of politicians who talk about things they have no idea about".
In the conference offered by Doctor Ávila during the seminar on meteorology, Benito Regidor asked a question about the warnings that were made from his prediction center before the arrival of the Delta storm. For the speaker of the National Hurricane Center of the USA, the work carried out by the Canarian meteorologists was correct, since it was a phenomenon that had not occurred in the archipelago since the 19th century.
Benito Regidor believes that it is not a matter of improving the prediction instruments, since the means that the Canary Islands have in this matter are the same as those they have in the rest of Europe and he attacks the politicians who clamor to get more materials, affirming that "these gentlemen believe that with one more satellite dish, they are going to improve the predictions".
According to him, every three hours, weather data is taken all over the world, which is entered into the large computers of the meteorological institutes. From the so-called "models", complicated equations, the maps are composed with which the experts predict the weather and that reach the Meteorological Center of the Canary Islands. "The weather data we offer does not originate here" clarifies Benito Regidor, "the technology does not go further, for the moment, it cannot be more exact" when predicting atmospheric events.
On the other hand, he recalls that his job is not to alert society, but to "say what is going to happen with the weather" so that the civil protection authorities decide what they should do and he complains that "if we do not alert the authorities, they throw stones at us", but if they do, they criticize how excessively cautious they are.
He is convinced that in the Canary Islands there are sufficient means to predict what will happen, now more with the upcoming installation of a second radar in Tenerife to improve coverage in the detection of adverse phenomena. In addition, the incorporation of 6 new predictors is planned, which are added to the 6 that already work in the Eastern Canary Islands Center.
Controversies aside, the reality is that phenomena such as the Delta or the cold drop in Tenerife in 2002 are manifestations of the metamorphosis of the climate. The ignorance of these adverse phenomena makes them more difficult to predict and therefore hinders the reaction capacity of public institutions to avoid the damage they may cause. This is one of the aspects contemplated in the national plan for adaptation to climate change that the Ministry of the Environment is preparing as one of the strategies to combat weather alterations. The draft of the plan has been presented to the National Climate Council on February 16 and is being submitted to public consultation.
