They have been warning for years that the Mediterranean is a powder keg for extreme phenomena.

The DANA (Isolated High Level Depression) that swept the south and east of Spain on Tuesday made history for the worst reasons. became the worst cold fall known in the Valencian Community and left at least a hundred dead. Among them, at least 92 deaths occurred in Valencia, and the rest between Castile-La Mancha and Andalusia. The truth is that scientists have been warning for years that the warming of the Mediterranean is the “fuel” for the formation of extreme events like this DANA.

“We are facing one of the worst episodes of torrential rain in recent history in the province of Valencia. Events like yesterday are relatively common in this area and at this time of year, but at this occasion, there was circumstances that made DANA particularly destructive“, explains Samuel Biener, Meteored expert, in statements to EL ESPAÑOL. “Its progress was quite slow, which meant that the precipitation affected the same areas for hours,” he adds.

The other circumstance is linked to the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea, which, according to Biener, is between 2 and 2.5 ºC above the usual temperature at this time of year “and that is premium gasoline for these events”. High sea temperatures cause greater humidity in the environment due to surface evaporation and this humidity factor causes more intense rainfall. “We have a warmer Mediterranean every year. In turn, the planet warms up and the hot air admits a greater water vapor content”, explains Mar Gómez, head of the meteorological sector of eltiempo.es.

However, experts argue that it is still early to determine whether this DANA is entirely due to global warming. “Wondering whether we would have suffered an event like this without climate change requires study a posteriori“, says Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, senior state meteorologist and member of the Spanish Meteorological Association. Science Media Center. “But in a context of climate change, this type of intense and exceptional rainfall phenomena, rare, “They will be more frequent and more intense and therefore destructive”.

According to Biener, this is already happening. “These episodes had a return period of several decades, but in recent years we are seeing them become more common. In fact, in the last few hours it reminds us of what happened in Orihuela in 2019, in a lowland area of ​​the province of Alicante”, explains the Meteored expert. Researchers have in fact been emphasizing for years than the sea The Mediterranean, warmer from year to year, is the powder keg of the most extreme atmospheric phenomena.

One of the most convincing scientific studies on the dramatic consequences of climate change has been published in the journal Nature in 2018. He warned that the frequency of cold drops and their intensity had increased significantly in recent decades. “Our data indicates that after correcting for changes in flood exposure, there was an annual increase in the area flooded and the number of people affected since 1870“, we can read in the study.

He is by no means the only one. He The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has also been warning for years that countries like Spain could face increasingly extreme events in the coming years, which a significant impact on the population and its current way of life. According to experts from this very prestigious group, the Mediterranean basin is one of the places most likely to suffer not only from droughts and fires, but also from floods resulting from extreme weather events like DANA which devoured the Spanish Levant.

Similarly, a few years ago, Aemet also published a study and article in which she asked: “Is the frequency or intensity of extreme precipitation in the Mediterranean increasing?” The conclusions could not be clearer: “The trends observed at the extremes of the precipitation distribution indicate a increased frequency and intensification of situations causing very heavy or torrential rain and a significant extension throughout the Spanish Mediterranean“.

The area that gets hottest

The warming experienced by the area of ​​the map in which Spain is located is, as the researchers point out, largely responsible for many of our problems. According to the Mediterranean Expert Network on Climate and Environmental Change (MedECC), the future average warming of the Mediterranean region “it will exceed the world average value by 20% per year and by 50% in summer”. In other words, the Mediterranean basin is warming more and faster than the rest of the world. “It is almost certain that the sea surface will continue to warm during the 21st century, between 1 and 4°C depending on the scenarios (low or high greenhouse gas emissions), and deep waters are expected to warm more in the Mediterranean than in other oceans. in the world.

This data comes from the MedECC document Climate and environmental change in the Mediterranean basin. Current situation and risks for the future. In recent years, experts have coined the term medical to refer to Mediterranean hurricanes, closely linked to the high temperatures of these waters. “It is neither more nor less than a Mediterranean cyclone exhibiting some characteristics of its older tropical brothersbut they are smaller than hurricanes in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico,” explains Francisco Martín León, Meteored meteorologist in this EL ESPAÑOL article.

Medications, according to the expert, are closely related to the phenomenon of cold drops and usually develop from DANA. Experts say that These training courses will become more and more common due to the water temperature records that the Mediterranean breaks every year. According to the Mediterranean Sea Surface Temperature project of the Mediterranean Center for Environmental Studies Foundation, the average surface temperature of the Mediterranean has increased by 1.4ºC over the past 40 years.