KNMI switching to area-specific weather warnings starting Monday

Starting Monday, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) will no longer assign a single color-coded warning to an entire province. Instead, it will issue more localized warnings for each type of weather event, showing more precisely which areas are set to be affected.

People often complain after a KNMI warning that conditions in their province were, for example, milder than painted out to be, a spokesperson told NU.nl. Additionally, sometimes a way smaller part of a province is affected than was expected. “By law we had to issue warnings for whole provinces, but now we can draw the boundaries more tightly.”

Beginning November 2, the KNMI’s app and website will stop coloring entire provinces on warning maps. The maps will instead show more flexible, localized zones so residents can see exactly what is happening and where. Thus, they can be better prepared.

The KNMI received legal approval in May to begin doing this. The system took effect specifically on Monday because the technical systems still needed to be adjusted, according to the spokesperson. “An entirely different dataset is involved, and it also has to be available to parties such as the NOS and Buienradar.”

“We already knew thunderstorms would rarely affect an entire province, yet we still had to issue a province-wide warning,” the spokesperson told the news outlet. “With the new system we hope to stop issuing those unnecessary alerts as often.”

Since August, the KNMI has been sending out separate alerts through its app for severe thunderstorms. These alerts warn users when a storm is expected at their exact location within the next 15 minutes.