Yago Sevilla: Why Seville’s latest heatwave has a name

As Seville names its second heatwave Yago, we take a look at its naming system and examine who is following in its footsteps.

The story so far: On Monday, Seville in Spain declared a heatwave as temperatures rose to almost 44 °C (111 degrees Fahrenheit). It announced that there would be a decrease in the risk level of the heatwave starting June 29, 2023.

The curious thing about this heatwave was that it had a name: Yago. This is only the second-ever named heatwave, after ‘Zoe’ which took place last year from July 24 to 26. While cyclones, tropical storms, tornadoes and other extreme events are given names each year, heatwaves are not.

As a Category 3 heat wave, Yago earned the ranking of the city’s most severe heatwave at its start.

How and why is Seville naming its heat waves?

Seville is among the first cities in the world to name and rank heatwaves, officially launching a pilot programme in June 2022. In July 2022, it was struck by heatwave ‘Zoe,’ its first named event.

The programme, called the proMETEO Sevilla initiative, sees the city of Seville collaborating with the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne-Arhst Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), and other partners including the Spanish Office for Climate Change, Spanish universities and research organisations.

Seville’s system has three rankings, based on criteria such as humidity, impacts on human health, and daytime and night time temperatures. Category 3 is the most severe. Names are given only to those heatwaves which reach high severity levels— a high-end Category 2 or low-end Category 3, over three days. The names chosen are in reverse alphabetical order: Zoe and Yago will be followed by Xenia, Wenceslao, and Vega.