EL ESCORIAL, Spain, March 23 (Reuters) - With climate change set to bring ever more frequent storms, floods and natural disasters, 21 European countries have created a unified weather alert system, its creators said on Friday. Meteoalarm, launched on Friday at the end of a week-long meteorological conference in Madrid, provides simple icon-based information on severe weather in 17 languages from a single web page, www.meteoalarm.eu. "Our job is to save lives and goods, and this project was needed in Europe," Tomas Molina, chairman of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorology, told a news conference. The new system should be simple and credible, so that on the rare occasions there is a red alert people will take it seriously, its backers said. Part of the reason the death toll from hurricane Katrina was so high in New Orleans was because people refused to leave their homes, the technical manager of Meteoalarm, Michael Staudinger said. "Warnings are only useful if they are believed, understood and acted on," said Dieter Schiessl of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Forecasting is becoming ever more accurate, but often countries lack a reliable means of warning the population. "The problem lies in alert systems, not in forecasting systems. That was the big lesson of the tsunami," Francisco Cadarso, director general of the Spanish National Meteorological Institute, said during the WMO conference this week. Technical advances and improvements in satellite images will steadily extend the range of reliable forecasting, saidMiguel Angel Rabiolo, director of Argentina's meteorological service "Today our forecasting is not more than five or seven days, but an experiment organised by the WMO will extend that to 15 days," he said.
