The World's First Named Heat Wave Was Called Zoe

Heat is the deadliest weather in Europe and the least respected, partly because it has no identity: a storm gets a name and a forecast personality, while a heatwave is just a hot week. In 2022 Seville launched proMETEO Sevilla, the first system anywhere to categorise and name heat waves, developed with the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and the University of Seville. Events are ranked in three categories by projected excess mortality rather than raw temperature — the algorithm uses humidity, the preceding thirty days and, critically, night-time temperatures, since it is the failure to cool down after dark that kills. Only categories two and three are named, running backwards through the Spanish alphabet. Heat Wave Zoe arrived in July 2022 as a category three, the first named heat event in the world, and a subsequent study of 2,022 adults found those who recalled the name reported taking more heat-safety precautions.