Friday, March 29

The wild hailstorm of the Empordà is the symptom of something much worse: the Mediterranean is boiling


“You sit down to dinner and the life you knew is over.” The terrible thing about those words that Joan Didion wrote about the fatal heart attack that her husband suffered one night in front of herself, is that it is true. Sometimes it’s sitting down to dinner, sometimes it’s a car ride we’ve done thousands of times, sometimes it’s just a walk in the park. Yesterday, in the Girona municipality of La Bisbal d’Empordà, a 20-month-old girl became the first direct death from hail in Europe in the last 25 years.


10 centimeters in diameter. It was a very strange, wild, sudden storm; with hailstones up to 10 centimeters in diameter. The images They are spectacular, the tragic consequences. In addition to the minor who died of a traumatic brain injury, material damage was counted in the thousands; the wounds, the contusions and the sutures, by dozens. The main suspect according to expertsit seems to be a too warm Mediterranean sea again.

“The Mediterranean Boils”. As we have been explaining for months, the situation is unusually complex. Since the end of May, the Mediterranean has been progressively warming without interruption. For weeks, parts of its basin have been at temperatures equivalent to those of the Caribbean Sea; but warming has been (and it seems that it will continue to be) a general problem that affects the entire Mediterranean as a whole.

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The high temperatures (from the heat wave) will end tomorrow, but the Mediterranean looks like the Caribbean and that is bad news

A huge amount of potential energy. The heat translates directly into the fact that there is an enormous amount of energy in the Mediterranean. This is worth explaining in some detail because, in reality, high sea temperatures do not cause storms. Storms are convective processes related to atmospheric dynamics; however, high sea temperatures enhance the size and virulence of these weather phenomena.

To use a metaphor, the warm sea does not cause the spark that causes the storm, but it does make more and more fuel available to the attempt. In this sense, it is inevitable to relate storms as unusual as the one in the Baix Empordà with phenomena as rare as the anomalous heating of the Mediterranean. What’s more, although we are talking about complex phenomena that are difficult to trace causally, many of the big storms of recent months seem to be related to the temperature of the sea.

What can we expect? The truth is that at the gates of meteorological autumn everything is too open to limit an accurate prediction. However, it should not surprise anyone that we find much more powerful storms than usual. That is, we do not know if there will be more storms or fewer, but we can take it for granted that the ones there will be more intense than they usually are. And yes, that includes hail.

The weather is getting crazy (and dangerous). In addition, it is very possible that we will see really strange things. Without going further, all models point a high probability that a very intense cyclone forms Very close to the Iberian Peninsula. As González Alemán from AEMET says, “it is a possible scenario since the hurricane has not yet formed and very complex processes come into play”, but “it is a fairly serious and representative scenario to monitor and be aware of”. we will be

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Image | Javibolikue



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