ESA-MEDICANES - CLIMATE ADAPTATION, EXTREMES, MULTI-HAZARDS AND GEO-HAZARDS SCIENCE (MEDICANES)

In the last decades, several Mediterranean cyclones have attained similar cloud structures and comparable intensities to tropical cyclones. These systems compose a peculiar subcategory of Mediterranean cyclones, known in the scientific literature as medicanes (a portmanteau of the words Mediterranean hurricanes). Despite their limited number to about 1-3 events per year, medicanes are directly related with high impact weather and thus have been constantly attracting the interest of the scientific community, but also of open public. They often cause numerous fatalities and severe damages in several countries due to strong wind gusts, high sea waves and heavy rainfall. There is no doubt that medicanes constitute prominent environmental risks that affect more than 500 million people in one of the most densely populated regions of the world. In this project we will rely on Earth Observations (EO) to provide a comprehensive approach on the problem of increasing our understandying of medicanes, better forecasting their occurrence and quantifying the limitations of atmospheric modelling in reproducing relevant high-impact weather.