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According to the Libyan authorities, the rains were so intense that two dams blew up during the night from Sunday to Monday. The town of Derna is, this Tuesday, September 12, under water and is cut off from the world. How to explain such damage?
A year’s worth of rain fell in one night. Libya suffered the full brunt of the effects of a very violent weather phenomenon. This is “medicane”, the contraction of “Mediterranean” and “hurricane”, hurricane in English. To find the origin of this intense precipitation, we have to go back a few days. In Greece, a storm named Daniel kills 15 people and causes flooding in the north of the country.
More intense phenomena
Then, the depression continues its route towards the west and the Mediterranean Sea. By rolling around on themselves, the winds favor the appearance of an eye, and therefore of a cyclone. For such a phenomenon to occur, you need warm seas, at 20°C up to 50 meters deep, very humid air and a disturbance like storm Daniel. Cold air and warm sea create a cyclone. Winds can reach 160 km/h. With global warming, these phenomena are more intense.
Among our sources:
Zoom Earth
Weather Solutions
Pierre Huat is a meteorological engineer at Weather Solutions, a service provider for France Télévisions.
Davide Faranda is a climatologist at the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute and searcher CNRS in climate sciences at the LSCE laboratory at the University of Paris-Saclay. He is a specialist in extreme climatic events and their link with global warming.
Non-exhaustive list.