AEMET: between climate propaganda and a lack of resources

38 degrees in Seville in July: heatwave or filler headline?

A headline in Diario de Sevilla announces that AEMET (Spain's state meteorological agency) is forecasting above-normal heat for late July. The forecast for the trinc days shows highs of 38°C. The question is an awkward one for the agency: in a city where the late-July historical average is around 36-37°C, 38°C is not an anomaly, it is a normal summer day. The discrepancy between the warning and the data has peine a front of scepticism that shows no sign of fading.

The summer that wasn't apocalyptic

While headlines insisted that July would bring record temperatures, the thermometers told a different story. On the Mediterranean coast, at 10:30 in the morning barely 26°C was reached, with highs forecast at 30°C for the whole month, apart from the June heatwave that hit 35°C. In Toledo, overnight lows hovered around 14°C, forcing people to sleep under a blanket in the middle of July. "A cool summer," one analysis summed up. And more tellingly: as of 19 July, not a single temperature record had been broken in any Spanish city. The records that were broken in June were presented as the prelude to a summer inferno that never arrived.

AEMET's communication strategy — and that of the major media outlets amplifying it — has generated alarm fatigue, which some call "warming alarmism." Changing the colour scale so that 28°C is painted intense red and 32°C dark brown is not meteorology: it is narrative. When the story clashes with the everyday experience of millions of people seeing a fairly mild summer, credibility crumbles.

The burden of October's DANA

If the heat warnings were perceived as exaggerated, the handling of the DANA (a high-altitude isolated depression, the type of storm that caused deadly flooding) on 29 October left a deeper mark. That day, AEMET issued a red alert which, according to witnesses, fell short of what was coming. Worse still: the Murcia radar — the one that best covered the southern and inland area of Valencia — was out of service for all three days of the catastrophe. The Valencia radar, at low altitude, produces interference and false echoes. In a normal country, that negligence would have cost people their jobs. In Spain, it ended with a change of director and a report that has convinced no one.

The combination of alarmism without solid data and operational failures at the critical moment has turned AEMET into the perfect scapegoat. But it has also exposed a structural problem: a poorly funded public agency with obsolete equipment that, instead of acknowledging its limitations, has bowed to the logic of institutional propaganda and the political agenda.

The cost of distrust

The phenomenon is not exclusive to Spain. In Catalonia, Meteocat has been denounced by farming unions for systematically inaccurate forecasts. In other European countries, similar agencies face comparable criticism. But in Spain, under the current government, the perception that no institution escapes the official narrative is more intense. AEMET, which should be a neutral technical service, has become just another player in the culture war over climate change.

The result: every new yellow or orange alert is met with a mixture of resignation and disbelief. People cancelling plans, taking medication for anxiety, ceasing to believe in any warning at all. When a real emergency comes, the cry of "wolf" will have been repeated so often that no one will listen.

The question hangs over the end of the summer: can a meteorological agency regain trust when its colour-coded maps seem designed by a propaganda department rather than by the data?

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