2023-09-05 19:41:15
The country might well experience, in the days to come, a “Medicane”, a rare phenomenon, resulting in new very heavy rainfall and even more violent winds.
After the flames, the deluge? While Greece has experienced historic fires this summer, the country has been in the grip of a storm and violent flooding since yesterday, and fears the worst for the days to come. Some fear that the kingdom of Zeus will be hit by a rare meteorological phenomenon, called medicane. A contraction of the Mediterranean and the English term hurricane (“hurricane”), it borrows the same structure as the hurricane, with an eye and a wall of clouds revolving around it, accompanied by powerful winds and heavy rains. While generally remaining less devastating, rarely reaching the force of a category 1 hurricane, or 120 km/h.
“For the time being, however, it is still only a depression, and not yet a medicane, with a hot heart like in tropical cyclones, tempers Caroline Muller, researcher in atmospheric and climate sciences at the CNRS , currently a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria. According to forecasts, therefore with their share of uncertainty, it is nevertheless expected that it will turn into a medicane on Wednesday or Thursday, with, according to Swiss models, winds that can reach 200 km / h, in other words a very important phenomenon .”
According to Greek meteorological services, the amount of precipitation caused by the storm called Daniel has already exceeded 600 mm on Tuesday in Pelion, in the center of the country, the equivalent of what falls in a year in Paris. “Concretely, the weather station of Zagora from the beginning (00:00) until noon (15:00) Tuesday September 5, recorded 645 mm of rain”, details meteo.gr, who considers on his account X (formerly Twitter) that “the rain will continue throughout the day with a possible new pan-European record”. So far the bad weather has caused the death of at least one person.
The persistence of such a phenomenon is linked “to a situation of air blockage in the form of an omega, with high pressure in France and on both sides, including in Greece, low pressure and humid air . Under these conditions, the air does not circulate and the rain accumulates,” adds Caroline Muller.
On her Twitter account, climatologist Monica Ionita warns: “The current weather situation in Europe is a classic Omega block. While Central Europe will “benefit” from a heat wave, Greece will be faced with a #medicane with disastrous damage from heavy rains and floods fueled by an extremely hot Mediterranean Sea.”
If it were to happen, this event, statistically weak, is however not new: Italy experienced a medicane in 2021, and Greece in 2020. “The phenomenon might be favored by global warming insofar as that -this increases the energy of the seas and oceans and therefore what is then released into the atmosphere,” adds Caroline Muller.
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