Santander (EFE) in this autonomous community for a hundred years.
The Aemet has witnessed record gales, rains and snowfalls in Cantabria, the Santander fire in 1941 and has even suffered a bomb fall during the Civil War on its previous headquarters, explains in an interview with EFE the delegate of the Agency in the region, José Luis Arteche.
To understand the origin of the Aemet in Cantabria, we must go back to the 19th century, when the State called on professors from all over the country to carry out rain measurements and send the data to Madrid, a global initiative to which Spain joined. .
The first measurements were “very simple”: basically rain collected with small rain gauge devices in small wooden sentry boxes to measure temperature and evaporation, Arteche points out.
Over time, it ceased to be a job exclusively for professors and other “observers” joined, such as teachers and anyone with an interest and means to make measurements.
Today, farmers, farmers and even nuns take measurements. Arteche highlights the Clarisas Sisters of Villaverde de Pontones (Ribamontán al Monte), who measure from “a long and very good time”.
Until 1997, the Aemet was in a building known today as “the Meteorological”, located between Alta and Monte de Santander streets, and which, after becoming the meteorological center of Asturias and Cantabria, has become a civic center thanks to to the transfer of the Government of Spain to the City Council of the Cantabrian capital.
It saw storms, fires, natural disasters of various kinds and even suffered the fall, surely involuntary, of a bomb between 1936 and 1937.
At first its measurements were “very basic”, but in the eighties there was a “gradual” jump that put the Spanish delegations in the orbit of the most advanced countries, so that center remained small.
The way of measuring has barely changed in 200 years, what there are now are automatic stations and other support systems such as radars or satellites.
“The weather is very different from what I knew in the eighties. Now you have to have very immediate and high-quality data to know what is happening,” says Arteche, before pointing out that “small measures” are also “essential”, for example, to assess the progress of climate change.
Today, the Delegation of Cantabria, in which some forty people work, is dedicated above all to aeronautical forecasts in the north of Spain, from Galicia to the Bárdenas Reales de Navarra, although security forces and bodies also take advantage of their work, institutions, event organizers, companies or users, since their applications are “unimaginable”.
Its headquarters are located in Cueto, by the sea, and it is a mixture of past and present.
In its facilities, modern forecasting equipment and state-of-the-art equipment coexist with an evolutionary museum where you can find relics such as old calculators or computers “of the kind that existed before Bill Gates got into a garage,” jokes the regional delegate. from Aemet.
The weather like football
Tomorrow, March 23, World Meteorological Day is celebrated, in which Aemet takes the opportunity to honor some of its many collaborators in Cantabria, in this case the farmer Manuel Sainz, from Cabezón de la Sal, and the educator Ignacio Ibarra, of the environmental education center of the Caja Cantabria Foundation in Polientes (Valderredible).
Their trajectory as meters is rewarded -for example, Ibarra controls an automatic station- and also their informative work.
“I think that almost everyone understands this, like other things like football,” says Arteche, since meteorology is a discipline that closely affects everyone in their daily lives.
However, he believes that the citizen, as a general rule, does not know all the possibilities offered by this science and its influence on the country’s economy, on health or on the prevention, for example, of natural disasters.
“Even the Spanish Army, when it is abroad, receives support from Aemet so that it does not encounter adverse surprises,” he adds.
Navigation, aeronautics, agriculture, culture or sports are just examples of the usefulness of meteorology. “I realize that people come to visit us, that I supposed that they could know something about this, and to my surprise it is not like that,” he admits, before betting on dissemination so that it is an increasingly understood science.
Pablo G. Hermida