Abstract
The Mediterranean region is regarded as the meeting point between Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Due to favourable climatic conditions, many civilizations have flourished here. Approximately, about half a billion people live in the Mediterranean region, which provides a key passage for trading between Europe and Asia. Belonging to the middle latitude zone, this region experiences high meteorological variability that is mostly induced by contrasting hot and cold air masses that generally come from the west. Due to such phenomenon, this region is subject to frequent intensive precipitation events. Besides, in this complex physiographic and orographic region, human activities have contributed to enhance the geo-hydrologic risk. Further, in terms of climate change, the Mediterranean is a hot spot, probably exposing it to future damaging events. In this framework, this research focuses on the analysis of precipitation related events recorded in the EM–DAT disasters database for the period 1979–2018. An increasing trend emerges in both event records and related deaths. Then a possible linkage with two meteorological variables was investigated. Significant trends were studied for CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) and TCWV (Total Column Water Vapor) data, as monthly means in 100 km2 cells for 18 major cities facing the Mediterranean Sea. The Mann–Kendall trend test, Sen’s slope estimation and the Hurst exponent estimation for the investigation of persistency in time series were applied. The research provides new evidence and quantification for the increasing trend of climate related disasters at the Mediterranean scale: recorded events in 1999–2018 are about four times the ones in 1979–1998. Besides, it relates this rise with the trend of two meteorological variables associated with high intensity precipitation events, which shows a statistically significative increasing trend in many of the analysed cities facing the Mediterranean Sea.
Highlights
The Mediterranean area shows a complex hydro-meteorological cycle [1] with important socio-economic implications for a wide region, encompassing southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East [2,3,4,5]
The EM–DAT database analysis allowed the assessment of the geo-hydrological severe weather events over the 40-year period for the countries facing or close to the Mediterranean Sea: both the events, count per year and per month, and the related casualties were considered
In the first part of the work, the geo-hydrological severe events that occurred in the countries facing or close to the Mediterranean area, for the 40 years period 1978–2018, were analysed, and it was concluded that events in the last two decades are about four times the number of those in 1979–1988, and more than two times the number of those in 1989–1998
Summary
The Mediterranean area shows a complex hydro-meteorological cycle [1] with important socio-economic implications for a wide region, encompassing southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East [2,3,4,5]. It provides a unique atmospheric, oceanic and hydrological coupled system, due to its geomorphological setting: a nearly closed sea surrounded by urbanized coasts and mountains from which numerous rivers originate. Severe weather events, including heavy precipitation leading to flash-flooding episodes, occur during the fall season; severe cyclogenesis associated with strong winds and large sea waves occur during winter. Large decreases in mean precipitation and increases in precipitation variability during the dry (warm) season are expected, as well as large increases in temperature (from +1.4 to +5.8 ◦C in 2100)
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