Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-13
Source: The Conversation – France in French (2)– By Emmanouil Flaounas, Senior researcher in atmosphere and climate sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich The medicane (from "Mediterranean hurricane") Ianos crosses the Ionian Sea and approaches the Greek coasts on September 17, 2020.
Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by the ESA,CC BY-SA In March 2026, a cyclone named "Jolina" caused significant damage throughout North Africa. In 2020 and 2023, the storms Ianos and Daniel caused severe damage in Greece, and Daniel continued its path to Libya.
There, it caused a humanitarian disaster in the city of Derna, where thousands of people were declared dead or missing. These tropical-type cyclones occur in a region that is not tropical, the Mediterranean Sea. They have been known since the 1980s and are called"medicanes", a portmanteau word formed from "Mediterranean" and "hurricane" (ouragan, in French).
Like all storms, medicanes know no borders.
When they sweep the Mediterranean coast, one of the most densely populated and vulnerable regions in the world (the total population of Mediterranean countries in 2020 was about 540 million people, including approximately onethird lived in coastal areas), their effects extend over several countries.
These storms draw their energy from the reservoir that is the heat of the sea. Due to climate change, the temperature of the Mediterranean is increasing, and the reservoir is expanding.
This phenomenon involves coupled atmospheric and oceanic effects, and it is urgent to conduct further research in order to improve early warning systems and population preparedness — both in terms of civil protection and the way we would face a catastrophic event that exceeds our level of preparedness.
Medicane storms: rare and devastating hurricanes in the Mediterranean One of thefirst research articleson the subject, dating from 1983, opened with the sentence: "Sometimes, Mother Nature does her best to deceive us," accompanied by a satellite image of a cyclone showing a well-organized spiral cloud structure and a cloudless eye at its center, strikingly similar to what one would expect to see… in the tropics.
These words hinted at the surprise of discovering a phenomenon as impressive and counterintuitive as a tropical-type storm structure in the Mediterranean. Since then, significant progress has been made in understanding medicanes thanks to international scientific collaborations.
In 2025, a collective research effort led to aformal definitionof this phenomenon once counter-intuitive. Medicane Jolina moves toward Libya across the Mediterranean Sea in March 2026. The eye of the storm is calculated in near real-time and represented by a red dot.
Source: Eumetsat/CNR-ISAC/ESA Medicanes Project. What should be retained from this definition is that medicanes share important physical characteristics with tropical cyclones, but are not identical to them. Flooding due to intense and widespread precipitation constitutes their most serious hazard, often extending well beyond the cyclone's center and covering areas on a national or international scale.
Finally, and this is crucial: the winds are very strong near their center, which means that it is necessary to precisely determine their trajectory and the place where they make landfall if we want to better prevent the impacts related to windstorms and storm surges.
Events meeting this formal definition occur on average less than three times per year. This limited frequency means that our statistical data are still too scarce to draw definitive conclusions about the locations where medicanes occur.
How climate change affects hurricane risk in the Mediterranean Changes related to climate modifications are not reassuring.
Recent advances identify sea surface temperature as a key factor in the intensification of storms: a warmer sea causes increased evaporation and greater heat fluxes into the atmosphere, providing the energy necessary for the development and intensification of a medicane.
However, according to theAtlas of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the Mediterranean has warmed by about 0.4 °C per decade between 1990 and 2020, a clear trend that is accelerating. Although this figure may seem low on a daily basis, its physical implications are far from negligible.
Indeed, aan increase of only 1 to 2 °C can result in a significant rise in wind speeds and precipitation rates.
Moreover, the figure above represents an average at the basin scale (that is to say for the entire Mediterranean Sea); locally, during individual medicane events, sea surface temperatures exceeding the normal by 2 °C or more have already been recorded.
Arecent studyallowing a link to be established between the intensity of a medicane and climate change was published in 2022 and focused on the storm "Apollo" (2021), showing that warmer sea surface temperatures and a warmer atmosphere had increased moisture availability and heavy rainfall over Sicily.
Somefurther analyses by Danielhave also revealed that extreme precipitation in the eastern Mediterranean and Libya had been intensified by climate change. More generally, recent research indicates that precipitation increases more markedly than wind intensity (changes in winds are also detected during certain events).
Today,climameter.org, an international consortium that conducts rapid attribution studies following a peer-reviewed protocol, monitors medicanes and Mediterranean cyclones through rapid attribution studies of emerging extreme phenomena.
New methods to monitor and better understand medicane storms are urgently needed Collaborative research between the scientific community and civil protection agencies has played a central role in the development of early warning systems and the improvement of preparedness.
One of these initiatives is theMEDICANES project of the European Space Agency— which notably addresses themedicine Jolina of March 2026At the time we are writing these lines.
In the end, to effectively adapt to climate change and more specifically to more violent medicanes in the Mediterranean, we need better climate forecast models that provide more reliable and precise estimates of extreme phenomena related to cyclones.
An end-to-end approach that translates scientific research results into actionable information to adapt prevention and civil protection is both timely and essential, especially for planning the resilience of infrastructures and early warning systems aimed at reducing vulnerability and socio-economic impacts.
AXA's scientific patronage is now part of the AXA Fund for Human Progress, which brings together the philanthropic commitments of the Group and AXA Insurance Mutuals in the fields of science, nature, solidarity, and culture.
Before 2025, this overall scientific patronage was managed by the AXA Fund for Research, which has supported more than 750 projects worldwide since its creation in 2007. For more information, visitAxa Fund for Human Progress. ProjectsTemplex(ANR-23-CE56-0002) andEXTENDING(ANR-22-EXTR-0005) are supported by the National Research Agency (ANR), which funds project-based research in France.
The ANR's mission is to support and promote the development of fundamental and applied research in all disciplines, and to strengthen the dialogue between science and society. For more information, visit the agency's website.ANR. < class="fine-print">Emmanouil Flaounas received funding from the European Space Agency (MEDICANES project with Contract No.
4000144111/23/I-KE). < class="fine-print">Davide Faranda received funding from ANR and ERC (Horizon). –ref. The "medicanes," these Mediterranean cyclones that climate change will worsen –https://theconversation.com/medicanes-these-mediterranean-cyclones-that-climate-change-will-worsen-282417