Property Insurance

Weather warnings

Purpose

Weather warnings show the official severe weather warnings in force at your sites on the Insurance map, as national weather services issue them. They help Insurance teams see which sites face a storm, flood, heatwave or other hazard right now, and read each warning as its publisher wrote it.

Weather warnings are on Insurance → Map, in the Weather warnings panel at the top left of the map.

The panel

  • The header counts the warnings shown on the map by level: those at your sites, or every warning in force when the panel is on Everywhere. Click it to open the list. The eye button hides the warning areas on the map, and shows them again.
  • Our sites lists the warnings covering at least one of your sites, most severe first, with the sites under each. Everywhere lists every warning in force in the part of the world in view: pan or zoom the map to explore.
  • Each warning shows its level, hazard and areas, your sites under it, when it ends, and when and by whom it was issued. Click it to zoom the map to it. The arrow next to it opens the warning on the publisher's site in a new tab, and the chevron shows the warning as published: its headline, description and what to do, in English where the publisher gives it.
  • On the map, the areas under a warning are coloured by level, the most severe on top, and a site under a warning gets a ring in its level's colour. Hover an area to see its warnings, and click it to open them in the list.

Levels

Warnings use the three awareness levels of MeteoAlarm, Europe's weather warning service:

  • Yellow: the weather is potentially dangerous. Be aware, especially if you are doing something exposed to the weather.
  • Orange: the weather is dangerous, and unusual events may cause damage. Be prepared.
  • Red: the weather is very dangerous, and exceptionally intense events may cause major damage. Take action.

The other publishers' levels are read onto these: the U.S. National Weather Service's severe alerts as orange and its extreme alerts as red, Environment Canada's yellow, orange and red warnings as they are, and GDACS's green, orange and red cyclone alerts as yellow, orange and red.

Where the warnings come from

  • MeteoAlarm (EUMETNET): the warnings of the national weather services of Europe, such as the Deutscher Wetterdienst, Météo-France and AEMET.
  • U.S. National Weather Service: severe and extreme weather alerts.
  • Environment and Climate Change Canada: colour-coded weather warnings.
  • GDACS (European Commission Joint Research Centre and UN OCHA): tropical cyclones worldwide. GDACS alerts are produced automatically and do not replace official warnings.

Warnings are checked every two minutes, and tropical cyclones every 30 minutes. When a source has not been checked for 10 minutes, or an hour for GDACS, its warnings are hidden and the panel says so, rather than showing warnings that may be out of date.

Hazards other than tropical cyclones are not covered in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Which sites are under a warning

A site is under a warning when its location on the map falls inside one of the warning's areas: a region the publisher names, such as a county or a forecast zone, or an outline the warning draws. The panel counts your active sites on the Insurance board that you have access to, the same sites the Map and Values pages show. A site without coordinates is not matched.

Each warning links to the publisher's page closest to it:

  • U.S. National Weather Service: the forecast page for the site's location, which lists the alerts in force there.
  • Environment Canada: the alert map, centred on the site.
  • GDACS: the storm's report.
  • MeteoAlarm: the country's page on meteoalarm.org, where the warning is one click away on the map.

For a warning that covers none of your sites, the link points to a place inside the warning's area.

Access

Users need the Read COPE & Values Insurance permission to see weather warnings, like the rest of the map. Group owners have full access. The warnings are the same for every organization; the sites are your own.

Good to know

  • Weather warnings are shown for awareness. 21RISK is not an alerting service: follow the instructions of your national weather service and local authorities.
  • Each warning is shown with its publisher's credit, its time of issue, and any disclaimer the publisher's terms ask for. The credit for the warning areas drawn on the map is under the map. 21RISK is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publishers.
  • The map draws warning areas simplified to about a kilometre, so a site right on a border can look just outside an area it is in. Sites are matched against the full outline.
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