The Basque Impact Weather Catalogue

Improving the resilience of our societies against impact weather is a priority today and will increase in importance in the future as a consequence of potential local increase of severe weather and exposure. As a first step in this complex process of impact weather characterization, accurate information from past events must be collected, prepared and maintained with different purposes. In this paper, we present the Basque Country Severe Event Catalogue, a multipurpose tool designed, developed and maintained by Tecnalia and Basque Meteorology Agency (Euskalmet) in order to register detailed information about severe/adverse weather events that affect our territory.

This catalogue is a space where we collect information for characterization and evaluation of extreme weather events. The focus is twofold: the environmental conditions and their associated impact.  In the first case different information related with synoptical and local hydro-meteo-ocean conditions are registered, including date, duration, spatial extension, event typology, hazard type, measurement statistics data and a brief summary. Dealing with impact, various metrics are defined in order to characterize main aspects, including severe weather warning level, economic damages, human fatalities or normal life disruptions.

Different data sources and repositories are used in the Catalogue elaboration, not only from Tecnalia and Euskalmet but also, especially in the side of impact, from emergencies interventions, newspapers, local media webs, Twitter and Spanish Insurance Consortium data.

Unless the amount of available material differs from case to case, a common information structure and minimum content is mandatory for all the registered events, in such a way that qualitative analysis based on extended reports and quantitative analysis based on data registered or estimated metrics are possible for 21st century.

In this work, we focus on the design and structuration of the catalogue, the methodologies used for environmental and impact characterization and the main steps followed for its implementation. We also present some general conclusions from the process and future work planned.