An international Warning System for the Alps: (to help us weather the storms)
Storms, lightning, hail, floods, snowstorms, avalanches, artic cold, icy motorways and streets, extreme heat with chronic water shortages, the danger of forest fires…
Are you planning to travel? Are you a mountaineer or a farmer? Do you need up-to-date information on risky weather situations? Now you can get the information by making a quick check of the Internet: 14 Alpine regions from Slovenia to Austria, Italy, Germany and Switzerland are working together for your safety.
In order to make sure that the general population, tourists, task forces, and the media can be warned in time, more than 1,200 weather stations have been set up and connected over the Internet.
The Home Page of this WebSite:
A general map of the 14 Alpine regions: Is your area coloured green? Then no dangerous weather is to be expected. With yellow some weather phenomena can already pose a problem. But, is your destination coloured orange or red? Then, be ready for higher risks and even life-threatening danger. On the Website next to the map you will find further information – quickly understood by means of symbols for the different types of hazardous weather. This information is supplied by the different weather services of the regions – arranged by colour for the different warning levels. The four-coloured scale ranges from green then yellow, to orange and finally red.
This new Website is useful to the millions of people on the move: tourists, Alpinists, water sports athletes, disaster relief workers, firemen, Red Cross workers and mountain rescue teams, as well as journalists and the media, not to mention farmers, hunters and gamekeepers.
 Data from more than 1,200 weather stations are evaluated every ten minutes, half hour or hour, and are used to make more accurate forecasts. The experts in the different regions exchange their ideas and discuss their forecasts over the telephone, in Internet conferences and through mailing lists.
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This Website is multilingual: Slovene, German, Italian, French and English.
The weather services of the 14 partner regions from the Vienna Woods, and the Po Valley to the Zugspitze and Swiss Mountain Peaks have brought “Alpine Space” on board – a IIIB-Project of the European Union, total budget: 1.9 Million Euro, which also includes the participation of MeteoSwiss, the Swiss weather service.
With that money additional weather stations, which include the most advanced radar systems, were built in areas that until now had too few of them. Altogether 50 scientists are integrated into the system. Despite all the digital and logistical complexity behind it, this Website stands out for being easy use, even for beginners and lay users. Have a look at it! Use it regularly!
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