Live tracker of named storms and DANAs affecting Spain, Portugal, France and the United Kingdom. Active, forecast, and significant historical events.
Storms named by AEMET, Meteo-France, IPMA and the Met Office. Peak values from official stations and ERA5 reanalysis.
Names are not handed out by each service as it sees fit: groups of countries agree an alphabetical list in advance, alternating masculine and feminine names, and work through it in order over the season. Spain belongs to the southwestern group, which shares a list with Portugal and France: AEMET, Portugal’s IPMA and Météo-France. Further north the western group operates the same way, with the UK Met Office, Ireland’s Met Éireann and the Dutch KNMI.
A depression is named when it is expected to require orange or red warnings — that is, when the risk to people is serious rather than merely inconvenient. It is not named for being deep; it is named for the damage expected of it. And as soon as one group names a storm, the others adopt that name rather than coining their own, because the whole point of the system is that the same storm is called the same thing in the forecasts, on the radio and in the headlines of every country it crosses.
That detail explains an oddity visible in this list: Ciarán appears under that name in Spain but is absent from the list AEMET published for that season. The western group named it, having seen it coming first, and AEMET adopted the name when it reached the Bay of Biscay.
A DANA — an isolated depression at high levels — is not a storm in this sense. It is a pocket of cold air that has detached from the general circulation and sits spinning several kilometres up, often with no defined low at the surface. Because the naming system was built around the wind and pressure of Atlantic depressions, a DANA does not fit the criterion and goes unnamed, even when it produces the worst episode of the year. The Valencia DANA of October 2024 is the case in point: no name, and still the worst Spanish weather disaster in decades.
That is why this tracker covers both. A list holding only named storms would leave out exactly those episodes where rain rather than wind is in charge, which around the Mediterranean is most of the serious ones.
Every page has two halves. A written one, which explains the specific mechanism: where it came in, what configuration made it possible and what was distinctive about it. And a measured one, computed on the European Centre’s ERA5 reanalysis, downloaded from the Copernicus Climate Data Store, at a point representative of the area affected: minimum pressure, maximum wind, accumulated rainfall and minimum temperature, each with its rank across thirty years of record.
The rank is what actually says whether a storm was exceptional. A 120 km/h wind means one thing at Finisterre and another at Alicante, and only comparing each figure against that place’s own history tells you which. When that comparison shows the episode did not stand out, the page says so: for Garoé, measured on Gran Canaria, none of the variables falls in the most extreme one per cent of the series, and that is written down as it is.
Official warnings are issued by AEMET and evacuation orders by Civil Protection. During an episode in progress, the number in Spain is 112.
