The Mediterranean sea is capable of generating hurricanes and climate change will make them worse |
In March 2026, a tropical-like cyclone named ‘Jolina’ produced significant damage across North Africa. In 2020 and 2023, storms Ianos and Daniel both caused severe damage in Greece, and the latter triggered a humanitarian disaster in the city of Derna, Libya, where thousands were declared dead or missing.
These tropical-like cyclones occur in a non-tropical region. They are known as ‘medicanes’ – a portmanteau of Mediterranean and hurricanes.
As any major storm, medicanes know no borders. Their impacts spread across multiple countries as they sweep across the Mediterranean coast, one of the world’s most densely populated and vulnerable regions (the total population of Mediterranean countries in 2020 was about 540 million people, around one-third of them living in coastal areas).
Rising sea temperatures due to climate change increase the reservoir of energy these storms can feed on. More research on this phenomenon, which couples atmospheric and oceanic effects, is urgently needed in order to improve early warning systems and the preparedness of populations, in terms of civil protection and regarding how we would affront a catastrophic event that might exceed our ability to prepare for them.
Medicanes: rare and devastating hurricanes in the Mediterranean
One of the earliest research papers on the subject, in 1983, opened with the sentence: “At times, Mother Nature does her best to deceive us”, accompanied by a satellite image of a cyclone displaying a........