the Mediterranean reaches 20 degrees and today a DANA is going to show us what it means

Let’s start at the beginning: what is going to happen today in Castellón is something completely ordinary. A DANA coming down from the Cantabrian Sea and discharging water over the interior and coast of Castellón, perhaps some hail and intense gusts of wind.

The extraordinary thing is everything else, everything that surrounds it: the warmest April in decades, the Mediterranean with a ‘heat wave’ at the beginning of May and the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen in the coming years.

What we do know is what is going to happen now. Because, as I said, the DANA was located on the Cantabrian Sea and has been moving towards the east. The point is that the most unstable sector of this DANA spreads today over the north of Castellón.

Once there, the DANA, the surface winds and a steep orography facing southeast force the rise of humid air from the Mediterranean. That is the recipe for potentially very intense convective nuclei in inland regions.

By Wednesday or Thursday the situation will improve.

As I say, a priori, it is nothing exceptional… Although we normally associate DANAs with autumn, the truth is that spring is also a time when they are abundant. What makes this event worth studying is the context that surrounds it.

…except for one thing. At the end of April, anomalies of 2 to 3 degrees were recorded in the Gulf of Valencia, the area around the Balearic Islands and Catalonia. A fact that summarizes all this: the Sa Dragonera buoy It touched 20 degrees on April 26while the average for the Balearic Sea in April is 14.9.

A warmer Mediterranean in spring is equivalent to more moisture available in the lower troposphere. When there is a contribution of cold air at altitude, that moisture becomes fuel: greater convective instability and more intense rains in less time.

This is the problem. While AEMET maintains the yellow noticethere is no reason to assume more danger than expected. However, it is true that it is increasingly difficult to rule out torrential accumulations in any month of the year.

The question is not whether it will rain a lot or not, the question is that DANAs arise on a Mediterranean different from the one that served as a reference to build our infrastructures and our warning thresholds.

Image | BenBaso

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