Citation

González-Alemán JJ, Insua-Costa D, Bazile E, González-Herrero S, Miglietta MM, Groenemeijer P, Donat MG. Bull. Am. Meterol. Soc. 2023; 104(8): E1526-E1532.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, American Meteorological Society, Publisher Allen Press)

DOI

10.1175/BAMS-D-23-0119.1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A record-breaking marine heatwave and anthropogenic climate change have substantially contributed to the development of an extremely anomalous and vigorous convective windstorm in August 2022 over the Mediterranean Sea.

On 17 August 2022, very high atmospheric instability and strong wind shear developed over the western Mediterranean. Ahead of an eastward moving shortwave trough, convective cells organized into a bow-shaped system, producing a long swath of severe winds from the Balearic Islands to southern Czech Republic on August 18 (Fig. 1a), with maximum wind gust of 62.2 m s−1, measured by Météo France at Marignana, Corsica. In total, 12 people died and 106 people were injured. This system can easily be classified as a derecho (ESSL 2022), a particularly long-lived and severe convective windstorm (Johns and Hirt, 1987; Corfidi et al, 2016). Concurrent with the derecho, a record-breaking marine heatwave (MHW) was present over the Mediterranean Sea during summer 2022, peaking in July. The sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies exceeded 3 °C (see Fig. 1b) over the region where the storm developed.
Fig. 1.

Language: en