How to prepare for extreme weather?
This is a question that leaders in several affected countries received this summer.
At Barcelona's supercomputer center, researchers are looking into the future of the climate.
Mare Nostrum 4, as the computer is called, occupies 200 square meters in Barcelona's supercomputer center.
It calculates the risk of, for example, extreme weather, temperature rises and water level rises.
Climate covid
Several of this year's extreme weather events have been within the framework of what the researchers expected, but the fires in Canada, on the other hand, have changed the playing field.
- It opens the door to more similar events in the future.
It is the climate equivalent of Covid, says Francisco Doblas-Reyes.
Creating a computer that can predict exactly what will happen at a given location and time would require new manpower and significantly greater investment than the hundreds of millions of euros already pumped into Mare Nostrum 4.
- So far we have not seen that willingness to invest, says Francisco Doblas-Reyes.
Sufficient knowledge
He adds that not only knowledge about the risk of extreme weather is enough, it must also be communicated.
Following the floods in Central and Western Europe, authorities in Germany and Belgium, among others, have been criticized for not warning or evacuating people in time.
But it does not depend on the possibility of being able to predict the events, says Francisco Doblas-Reyes.
- Today's weather forecasts contain sufficient high-quality information to have time to act before these extreme events occur, he says.