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A very rare Mediterranean hurricane called a "Medicane" set to dump a month's rain on parts of Greece today: Becoming more frequent
One month's rainfall is expected in parts of Greece today, it comes on top of three days of gale-force winds that knocked out power lines in several Attica neighbourhoods and other parts of the country on Thursday.
That weather system has been dubbed Xenophon by experts and is said to be on its way out, though only to be replaced by a Mediterranean storm with tropical characteristics equivalent to a hurricane, or Medicane, that has been named Zorba.
The Mediterranean hurricane heading towards Greece reached the southern Ionian Sea on Thursday evening, the meteorological service (Meteo) of the Athens National Observatory said on Thursday.
The hurricane is expected to continue eastward, bringing torrential rain and gale force winds to southern Greece and specifically to the Peloponnese and Crete on Saturday morning, Meteo said.
Hurricanes of this type are called Medicanes and reportedly appear in the Mediterranean once or twice a year.
In Greece they are even rarer, however, this will be the third year in a row that such a cyclone appears.
Before 2016, the Greek weather service recorded a Medicane in 1995.
Turkey
braces for Medicane, first hurricane in its modern history
28
September, 2018
Turkey
is bracing for the first hurricane in its modern history, expected to
hit its western coasts on Sept. 30.
A
tropical storm formed in the Central Mediterranean is expected to
gain strength and move east in the coming days, the state-run
Meteorological General Directorate said in a statement on Sept. 27.
Dr.
Murat Gündüz, an academic from Dokuz Eylül University (DEU) in the
western Turkish province of İzmir told local media the storm is
expected to turn into a hurricane on Sept. 28 before hitting Greece
and Turkey on the weekend.
Dubbed
“Medicane” as a combination of the words “Mediterranean” and
“hurricane,” the system is expected to bring winds as fast as 180
kilometers per hour when landfalling in Greece.
After
slowing down to 75-120 km per hour on the Greek mainland, the
hurricane is expected to hit Turkey’s western coasts, bringing 75
kilograms of rainfall per square meter.
“It
will arrive in İzmir on Sept. 30 evening or the morning of Oct. 1.
Our predictive models suggest Turkish coasts from the south of İzmir
to Antalya will be affected,” Gündüz said, stressing that a
Mediterranean hurricane is “a very rare phenomenon.”
It
will be the first hurricane in Turkey’s modern history and only
around a dozen of them have been recorded in past centuries.
“European
countries around the Mediterranean have no official agencies to
monitor hurricanes. It is expected we will see more of them in the
future due to climate change and we need centers to monitor them,”
said Gündüz.
“There
is no need for fear or anxiety but we should take precautions,” he
said.
