Understanding impact weather: insights from the Basque Country

Extreme weather and climate events have profound effects on societies, economies, and environments worldwide. As a result, meteorological and hydrological service providers and researchers are increasingly considering factors such as hazard, exposure, and vulnerability in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the full impact of weather and to contribute to minimizing fatalities and losses, thus enhancing resilience. Implementing these goals involves various technical and methodological approaches and numerous challenges in developing effective operational products and services.

In the case of the Basque Country, as in other parts of the world, improving the resilience of our societies against weather impacts is a current priority and will become increasingly important in the future due to the potential local increase in severe weather events and exposure. As a first step in this complex process of characterizing weather impacts, accurate information from past events must be collected, prepared, and maintained. To this end, a severe weather catalogue has recently been implemented, focusing on local weather impacts, to record detailed information about severe or adverse weather events that affect our society. This catalogue serves as a repository of valuable information for characterizing and evaluating extreme weather events and its consequences.

In this contribution, we present an in-depth study of severe weather events that have occurred in our territory during this century, including an analysis of the associated environmental conditions and their impacts. The main objective of this work is to enhance our understanding of local weather impacts by examining synoptic and local hydro-ocean-meteorological conditions conveniently correlated with the degree of impact. We analyze different key aspects aggregated by season, event typology, hazard type, and other relevant factors. Throughout this work, we present and discuss statistical findings to provide perspective and characterize the main aspects of the common hazards and impacts experienced by our territory. Dealing with impact, various indicators are defined and categorized to characterize key aspects, including severe weather warning levels, economic damages, human fatalities, or disruptions to normal life.