Medicanes are Mediterranean supercharged storms that could become more frequent
Agence France-Presse Fri 15 Sep 2023 02.07 BST
The flash flood that killed thousands of people in Libya this week followed a “medicane”, a rare but destructive weather phenomenon that scientists believe will intensify in a warming world.
The term is an amalgamation of the words Mediterranean and hurricane. Used by scientists and weather forecasters, it is less well-known to the wider public.
Medicanes, which tend to form over parts of the Mediterranean Sea near the North African coast, are similar to hurricanes and typhoons although they can develop over cooler waters.
They can also bear a physical resemblance on satellite imagery as a swirling mass of storm clouds surrounding an eye in the middle.
Fierce winds and rain are unleashed; Storm Daniel dumped approximately 170 millimetres of rain in Libya. This will intensify with global warming, scientists say.
“We are confident that climate change is supercharging the rainfall associated with such storms,” said University of Reading professor Liz Stephens.
The Mediterranean cyclones are usually smaller and weaker than their tropical equivalents and have a smaller space in which to develop.
Their peak strength is usually the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, encompassing speeds of 119-153km (74-95 miles) per hour.
Medicanes tend to form in the autumn when the sea is warm, usually in the western Mediterranean and the region between the Ionian Sea and the North African coast, explained Suzanne Gray, a professor at the University of Reading’s meteorology department.
A layer of colder air from higher altitudes forms convections with warmer air rising from the sea that converge around a centre of low pressure.
Medicanes form once or twice per year on average, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
While hurricanes move from east to west, medicanes tend to go from west to east.
Before striking Libya, Daniel pummelled Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey last week.
Three medicanes occurred off Greece between 2016 and 2018, while in 2019 Spanish weather services identified one between the Balearic Islands and the Algerian coast.
A medicane-packing winds of up to 120 kilometres per hour, dubbed Ianos, lashed Greece in September 2020, killing three people in the city of Karditsa and triggering floods, landslides and power cuts.
The Italian island of Sicily was also struck in 2021.
In 2020, French weather monitor Meteo-France said it was difficult to work out climate signals from medicanes due to their rarity.
While scientists are increasingly able to unpick the likely effect of climate change on the probability of an extreme weather event happening and its intensity, no such attribution study has yet been carried out on Daniel.
In general, experts say the warming of sea surface temperatures, driven by human-induced climate change, is going to make extreme storms more intense.
Oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat produced by human activity since the dawn of the industrial age, according to scientists.
Spanish researchers said the Mediterranean reached its highest temperature on record in July as Europe baked under a series of heatwaves.
The surface watersThe surface waters of the eastern Mediterranean and Atlantic are two to three degrees Celsius warmer than usual, which would have turbocharged Daniel.
“The fact that Daniel could form into a medicane … is likely a result of warmer sea surface temperatures and hence human-made climate change,” added climate scientist Karsten Haustein of Leipzig University in Germany.
Editor comments
Why are we having so many catastrophes around the world caused by weather anomalies? Compatriot was a military cloud-seeding project carried out by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War in 1967-1972. On a much grander scale, we have to await a new class of environmental weapons having great power, but at the same time, subtlety; these are to be the tools of what McDonald 2 refers to as “geophysical warfare”. These weapons, which include earthquakes, climate change, altered ocean currents, and tidal waves, can be triggered at a great distance from the victim and may be indistinguishable from natural disasters. Are they Red flags caused to take your attention away from the Biden investigations? Or to hide the Khazarian Mafia being investigated further?