This Sunday on the Tropical Costa de Granada An unusual phenomenon has been recordedbut it has caused great ravages. While people were trying to pass in the water the heat wave in which we are now, in a few minutes everything changed to have a hurricane and scorching wind on top. It reached such a speed that made the umbrellas and chairs shot as projectiles. And it was not a simple summer storm, but a phenomenon known as thermal burst.
What happened on the Granada coast. The sequence of the facts was dizzying. Shortly before 19:45, 112 emergency services The first calls began to receive Notice. The alerters, from different points of the Tropical Costa, talked about hurricane winds that even threw palm trees of the promenade. The climax of the phenomenon, According to the Aemet, It was recorded at 19:50 with a temperature that shot sharply until 40.1 ° C.
Jointly, wind gusts reached a speed of 86.8 km/h officially, although in different social networks users suggest that these speeds They reached 100 km/h. A phenomenon that concentrated in different municipalities such as Motril, Salobreña, Torrenueva, Carchuna and Almuñécar.
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Chaos on the beach and bailouts in the sea. Shared testimonies on social networks paint a collective horror picture. A citizen He reported: “I was there on the beach and the situation has been horrible, I have not had worse in my life.” The disseminated images In social networks they showed people running to their cars, which caused traffic jams on the exit roads of the coast. Although the greatest danger materialized in the water.
The rapid evolution of this meteorological phenomenon caused people to practice aquatic sports, and the wind caught several people who saw how they crawled inside and preventing returning to the shore by their own means. This triggered an operation where Seven people had to be rescued in front of the beaches of Torrenueva Costa and Carchuna. A rescue that was carried out by maritime rescue, but also by private vessels that prevented this situation from becoming a great tragedy.
A rapid official response. Given the violence of such an unpredictable phenomenon, the beaches of the affected municipalities They had to be evacuated. At 20:20, the mayor of Motril, Luisa García Chamorro, launched an urgent notice Through its social networks which reflected the seriousness of the situation, asking not to go outside and have a lot of caution.
A term comfort does not arise from nothing. They require an atmospheric configuration Very specifica “recipe” that this Sunday was perfect in Granada. The main ingredient was The extreme heat accumulated during the prolonged heat wave. This heat not only affected the surface, but created a deep layer of very hot air, and crucially very dry at the average levels of the atmosphere, several kilometers high from where the burst was given.
Meanwhile, on the sea, the air in contact with the water was comparatively cooler and more humble. This stratification with a very hot and dry air in height on a cooler and more wet layer near the surface is the ideal culture broth. The scenario was completed with the formation of convective storms on the mountains of the interior of Granada, which acted as the trigger for the process.
Of the rain that never falls to the scorching wind. The process of formation of a thermal burst is a fascinating paradox of thermodynamics, where a process that begins with an external cooling culminates in a burst of scorching heat. It can be broken down into four key steps According to the Aemet technical guides:
- The descendant current: everything begins within a storm cloud where a powerful current of descending air is generated that drags rainfall.
- Sudden evaporation: As this column of air and rain plummets, it meets the extremely dry and hot air layer that had been formed before. The dry air ‘absorbs’ voraciously all precipitation, causing it to evaporate completely before reaching the ground, something that is known as ‘virga’. Evaporation is a process that consumes energy, abruptly cooling the air of the descending column. This air, now much colder and dense than the one that surrounds it, collapses towards the ground at a dizzying speed.
- Compression warming: Once all the water has evaporated, the cooling process ceases. The air column, and if “refrigerant”, continues its free fall. When descending, atmospheric pressure quickly increases by compressing the mass of air. This compression is client at an extraordinary pace, known as dry adiabatic gradient.
- The impact or burst. Finally, this extremely hot, dense and dry air bubble violates the ground, like an invisible hammer. Unable to continue descending, it expands horizontally in all directions at high speed, generating destructive and sudden wind gusts and intense temperature rise that characterizes the phenomenon.
It is not the same as a tornado. Sometimes this phenomenon can be confused with a tornado, but There are differences. While in the tornado the wind revolves around a vertical axis, in the bursting the winds are descending and linear.
Climate change will make them more frequent. Thermal bursts are a natural phenomenon, but climate change is causing them to be more frequent. The report of the IPCC scientific experts It is unequivocal: heat waves are now more frequent, more durable and more intense due to global warming.
The Granada event was no exception. It was the culmination of a historical heat wave in Andalusia. As explained before, the temperature is the fundamental ingredient that creates and dry the necessary atmospheric layer for the thermal burst to activate. An ordinary storm, in a less extreme environment, could have generated a cold front that refreshes the environment. However, when interacting with an “prepared” atmosphere by anomalous heat, the result was the violent explosion of scorching air.
More energy and more extreme. The connection goes beyond heat waves. One of the most direct consequences of the increase in global temperatures is that the atmosphere can retain more water vapor and, therefore, more energy. IPCC reports confirm that this is causing an intensification of the global water cycle. In practice, this translates into more extreme precipitation events and more powerful storms.
Although attributing a single blowout directly to climate change is scientifically complex, the general trend is clear: the atmospheric environment is becoming more conducive to severe convective storms, which are the “mother clouds” of bursts.
What to expect in the Iberian Peninsula. Numerous studies climatic point out that the Mediterranean account is a “hot point” of climate change. And all because it hot at a rate greater than the world average. Data for the Peninsula They are alarming: summers are now five weeks longer than in the 1980s, The torrid nights They have multiplied by ten in the big cities and the number of days with heat wave have doubled.
This future scenario, with longer and longer summers and greater energy available in the atmosphere, suggests that the conditions that favored the burst in Granada will not be a rarity. On the contrary, they are likely to become a more common characteristic of our summers. The combination of intense heat, atmospheric instability and the particular configuration of air mass that results in these phenomena will be increasingly frequent as global temperatures continue to increase.
A problem that goes beyond the bursts. This summer is undoubtedly being devastating for Spain, where There are nine of the ten warmest villages in Europe. High temperatures that are giving us tropical nights, and A series of fires Behind them that are ravaging the northern part of our country right now.
Images | Miguel Gómez
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