Yellow, orange or red warning: what each colour means and how often it happens

Published 11 October 2026 · Climaviso

Spain's severe-weather warnings come in three colours: yellow, orange and red. Each one marks a level of danger, not damage. This is what each means, and how often each colour was issued across Spain's 182 warning zones from 2019 to 2025.

The three levels

Level	Danger	What to do	Warning days, 2019–2025
Yellow	Low. Vulnerable people and property in exposed areas could suffer some impact.	Stay alert.	82.6%
Orange	Significant. Vulnerable people and property in exposed areas could suffer serious impacts.	Be prepared.	16.6%
Red	Extraordinary. Very serious or catastrophic impacts are possible.	Follow the authorities' instructions and avoid travel unless necessary.	0.9%

Definitions summarised from AEMET's. Percentage: of all zone-days with a warning from 2019 to 2025, how many had that colour as their highest level.

There is no green warning. On warning maps, green means the zone has no warning at all: no threshold is expected to be exceeded.

How often each colour happens

From 2019 to 2025, Spain's 182 warning zones added up to 71,248 zone-days with a warning (a zone-day is one zone with a warning on one day). Of those, 58,823 were yellow, 11,809 orange and 616 red.

A typical zone (the median) has about 54 warning days a year: 44 yellow, 8 orange and no red. Over seven years the median zone had 2 red days, and 51 of the 182 zones had none at all.

Across Spain as a whole, red comes up more often: some zone had a red warning on 163 days in those seven years, about 23 a year. And somewhere in Spain had a warning of some colour on 2,280 of the 2,557 days: nearly nine days in ten.

The zones with the most red days from 2019 to 2025:

Zone	Red days
Litoral sur de Valencia	24
Ribera del Ebro de Zaragoza	20
Este, sur y oeste de Gran Canaria	16
Campiña cordobesa	15
Sol y Guadalhorce (Málaga)	15

Which warnings reach red

The most common red is for heat: 319 zone-days from 2019 to 2025. Then rain (174), snow (74), cold (33), storms (23) and wind (14). Fog and suspended dust never go above yellow: the warning plan has no orange or red level for them.

The same colour isn't the same temperature everywhere

Each zone has its own thresholds, set by what is rare and dangerous there. Heat shows it clearly: in Bizkaia, the yellow warning starts at 34 °C, orange at 37 and red at 40. In the Córdoba countryside (Campiña cordobesa), at 38, 40 and 44. In other words, 40 °C is a red warning in Bilbao and an orange one in Córdoba.

Rain works the same way. In most of Spain, the yellow warning for intense rain starts at 15 litres per square metre in an hour; in the Valencia region and much of Catalonia and the Balearics, at 20. The colour measures how exceptional a value is for that place, not the value itself.

A warning is not an emergency alert

Warnings are issued by AEMET, Spain's weather agency, and they are forecasts. What happens next (activating an emergency plan, closing schools, sending an ES-Alert message to phones) is decided by the civil protection authorities. That's why there can be a red warning with no message on your phone, or an emergency message hours after the warning, as happened in Valencia on 29 October 2024: Valencia's DANA, hour by hour.

Where to see your zone's warnings

Today's and tomorrow's warnings, province by province: today's warnings. The day-by-day history of any town since 2018: find your town. How the year is going across Spain: warnings review.

More guides

Sources

Levels and what to do: AEMET, how to read warnings (Spanish).
Thresholds by zone: AEMET, Meteoalerta plan, annex 1: thresholds and warning levels (31 May 2022, Spanish).
Counts: AEMET's warning archive (CAP format, AEMET OpenData), collected by Climaviso since June 2018. A day with several warnings in a zone counts once, at its highest level.

Towns in this article

A warning is not damage; a zone is not a building.