The story so far: On Monday, Seville in Spain declared a heatwave as temperatures rose to almost 44 °C (111 degrees Fahrenheit). It announced that there would be a decrease in the risk level of the heatwave starting June 29, 2023.
The curious thing about this heatwave was that it had a name: Yago. This is only the second-ever named heatwave, after ‘Zoe’ which took place last year from July 24 to 26. While cyclones, tropical storms, tornadoes and other extreme events are given names each year, heatwaves are not.
As a Category 3 heat wave, Yago earned the ranking of the city’s most severe heatwave at its start.
How and why is Seville naming its heat waves?
Seville is among the first cities in the world to name and rank heatwaves, officially launching a pilot programme in June 2022. In July 2022, it was struck by heatwave ‘Zoe,’ its first named event.
The programme, called the proMETEO Sevilla initiative, sees the city of Seville collaborating with the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne-Arhst Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), and other partners including the Spanish Office for Climate Change, Spanish universities and research organisations.
Seville’s system has three rankings, based on criteria such as humidity, impacts on human health, and daytime and night time temperatures. Category 3 is the most severe. Names are given only to those heatwaves which reach high severity levels— a high-end Category 2 or low-end Category 3, over three days. The names chosen are in reverse alphabetical order: Zoe and Yago will be followed by Xenia, Wenceslao, and Vega.
Each level will see different emergency response services being triggered; these may include weather alerts, public information, cooling centres, or teams being sent to check in with at-risk populations.
The initiative springs from a wish to decrease heat-related illness and death by raising public awareness of the dangers of heatwaves. On its website, Arsht-Rock calls heatwaves “the silent killer,” saying that the dangers they pose “wreak havoc that is largely unseen,” and highlighting that extreme heat kills half a million people worldwide every year.
In June 2022, when the project was launched, Spain faced record-breaking high temperatures; the first two weeks of the month were the country’s hottest on record till then, per Spain’s national meteorological service. Madrid saw temperatures rising above 40.7 °C (105.3 degrees Fahrenheit)— matching its all-time record.
While Yago has a name, it is not the only heatwave or event to hit the nation since the programme was launched last year. Spain was also hit by heatwaves in April and this spring was the country’s hottest and second-driest on record. The naming system is yet to be applied to the rest of Spain, but there is hope that it has started to alter behaviours in Seville. After Zoe last year, surveys in Seville and neighbouring areas indicated that people may have been more likely to take heat-protective measures and check with neighbours owing to the programme. A greater level of trust in the government’s heat-protection abilities was also reported.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) highlighted that Europe also saw its second-hottest June on record last year. Around 16,000 excess deaths took place last year in Europe due to heatwave conditions. Further, as a recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlighted, people with disabilities faced risk of death, and physical, social, and mental health distress due to extreme heat, particularly if “left to cope with dangerous temperatures on their own.”
This year is not much better: on June 16, 2023, the WMO reported that per C3S data, global-mean air surface temperatures for the first days of June were the highest for the time of the year, following one of the warmest Mays on record. Antarctic sea ice cover also reached a record monthly low in May— for the third time this year. At 8.8 million sq. kms on average, it was 1.8 sq. kms (17%) below the average for May in 1991-2020.
Are any other countries naming their heatwaves?
While they may not be naming their heatwaves yet, cities in Greece, including Athens, have been evaluating, categorising and ranking heat events over the last year. These initiatives too flow from collaborations with Arsht-Rock.
Santiago, Chile also has a similar programme in place. The United States, too, has a few cities, such as Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee and Kansas City, which have launched similar programmes. In September 2022, California adopted a law putting in place a heat wave ranking system which must go into effect by January 1, 2025. In the United States, excessive heat remains the top weather-related cause of death, followed by floods at no. 2, based on an NOAA study that tabulated this data from 1992 to 2021.
India has no such naming system in place, although it does suffer massively from heatwaves. An international team of leading climate scientists, which studied South and Southeast Asia’s extremely humid heat in April 2023, said that heat waves in India and Bangladesh, previously occurring less than once a century on average, can now be expected around once in five years.
Most recently, India saw a heatwave event where sixty-eight patients died at the district hospital in Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia in five days till June 19. An analysis using a metric called the Climate Shift Index (CSI), developed by an independent US research group called Climate Central, showed that the event was made at least two times more likely due to human-caused climate change.
What are some concerns about naming heatwaves?
Last year, the World Meteorological Organisation, UN’s specialised agency responsible for weather, climate and water, recognised the interest in developing heatwave ranking and naming systems, and indicated that the WMO Services Commission was weighing the benefits and challenges with such naming.
It however cautioned that “what has been established for tropical cyclone events” may not translate easily across to heatwaves. “Caution should be exercised when comparing or applying lessons or protocols from one hazard type to another, due to the important differences in the physical nature and impacts of storms and heatwaves,” it said. Adding that while heatwaves can be forecast “up to 10 days in advance in many areas (mainly extra-tropics and high latitudes)“ they “lack skill at 3-day lead-times in many regions (mainly tropics).” Additionally, it also highlighted that studies show heat-related illness and death are also “strongly associated with ‘mild’ hot days, occurring outside declared heatwave events, including hot nights, prolonged occupational heat exposures, and exertional heat stress.”
In an interview with CBC, Canadian climatologist David Phillips expressed that he was not in favour of the system, saying that it raises no fear. He also highlighted that the reason tropical storms were named was for the purposes of clear communication, since many storms may be occurring close by.
Heatwaves are also difficult to define and measure, Mr. Phillips pointed out, saying that in case of a storm there is one scientific, measured element which decides the category— sustained wind.
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