• April 19, 2024

The word "raw" also means "scarce", so we could say that a winter raw as well as being minimal in heat, it is also foods for the excess of cold. This period affects almost 30 million people in the country; three million of them live in weather winter more than half of the year.

At the end of the 90s, Rosalía Vidal Zepeda, researcher at the Institute of Geography of the UNAM , identified the existence of a strip of territory, located in the north of the country, in the Sierra Madre Occidental, where winters They are raw and last between 6 and 12 months a year.

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According to the geographer, the first encounter he had with this type of severe winters was in 1997. During a visit to the community of Miravalle, in the Sierra de Durango, he observed that every day he woke up with temperatures close to zero degrees centigrade, even in the month of April.

"I had no idea that in Mexico there was such a large area, where the winters are raw and aggressive. But when gathering information and data from more than 1,800 weather stations, it was surprising to know that many communities in that area, from October to early April or May, have subzero or near zero temperatures every day. " he explained.

Map of cold regions

Thus, the records, which he carried out together with María Inés Ortiz Álvarez, also a researcher at the Geography Institute and a specialist in population studies, culminated in the creation of the first Map of the Regions with Winter of Mexico , where the distribution of the exposed population is observed.

In it you can see that not only in the north do you experience raw winters, but also in the central region, which is densely populated. In the mountains of central Mexico, for example, the slopes of Ajusco, the Sierra Nevada, the Cofre de Perote and the Pico de Orizaba, there are four times more inhabitants affected by the cold than in the northern region.

This map, which is the first of its kind, is consulted by the National Center for Disaster Prevention and other institutions that need to alert the population about the dangers of winter and cold fronts.

Researchers María Inés Ortiz Álvarez and Rosalía Vidal Zepeda continue studies on winters. In addition to measuring their duration, now they have been interested in studying the intensity and the most frequent atmospheric phenomena in each season .

When analyzing data from weather stations, geographers have identified that winters in Mexico have changed in recent decades. In Mexico City, for example, cold winters no longer show up since the 1970s, due in part to urban growth.

"Now we only have temperate and still warm winters. The warm temperatures average over 15 degrees, the temperate from 14 to 15, the mild on average 12 to 14 degrees and the cold, less than 12 degrees, which were frequent in the 1920s to 1930s.

The main cause is the island of heat, a phenomenon of increase in temperature that is produced by the increase of the population and the asphalt surface in a city.

Among the future projects of the researchers is the study of cold waves, considered by the World Meteorological Organization as "three days in a row with temperatures below a certain threshold".

Knowing the characteristics of winters in our territory, the areas where they occur with greater intensity and their duration, it is important for the authorities to provide timely help and avoid deaths during the storms winter