A severe storm with heavy rain and wind speeds of over 110 km/h hit Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands on Wednesday (August 14, 2024) – exactly ten days earlier than last year. Will vacationers on boats in the Balearic Islands have to prepare for storms in August in the future? What is the reason for this?
A severe summer storm with heavy rain fell on Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands on Wednesday (August 14, 2024). The Mallorcazeitung reported that it started in the morning on the Pityusen islands of Formentera and Ibiza. In the harbor of La Savina on Formentera, the wind pushed numerous boats ashore.
Video footage shows how the storm and high waves have pushed boats onto the shore, and even some boats are lying on the coast. The wind in La Savina reached speeds of up to 117 km/h, mallorcazeitung.es reported. The first wind whirls were sighted around midday. In Palma, it started to hail around 12:40 p.m., with heavy rain and wind having been raging for several minutes.
According to the weather service Aemet, which the Mallorcazeitung quotes, wind speeds on Mallorca reached up to 90 km/h. The highest values were measured in Santa Maria, at the Son Bonet airfield in Marratxí and in Port de Sóller.
A year earlier, there had also been gale-force gusts and heavy storms on the holiday island of Mallorca
Almost exactly a year earlier, on August 28, 2023, the world had reported “gale-force gusts” and “heavy storms” on the holiday island of Mallorca. Two German sailors were initially reported missing; due to the cancellation of dozens of flights due to the storm, hundreds of tourists would have had to spend the night after the storm at Palma Airport, and a cruise ship was involved in a “weather-related incident” at Palma harbor.
This raises the question of whether there is a meteorological law behind this, and whether people who spend their summer vacation on a boat in the Balearic Islands should prepare themselves for the fact that there will be stormy low-pressure systems around Mallorca as early as late summer. “Storms over the Balearic Islands are becoming more frequent,” writes telepolis.de, for example – and also mentions the possible cause: extreme temperature differences between water and air.
Storms over the Balearic Islands are becoming more frequent, due to extreme temperature differences between (warm) water and (cold) air
At almost 30 degrees, the sea off the coast of Mallorca was extremely warm last year and this year (28 to 29 degrees Celsius, source: wassertemperatur.org). Due to the high temperatures, a lot of water evaporates – more than usual. However, the more water vapor is enriched in the air, the more energy is available for potential storms. Violent storms can be the result when cold air masses move in from the north.
In autumn, one even has to reckon with so-called medicanes, writes telepolis, a kind of hurricane in the Mediterranean. For these to develop, there needs to be a temperature difference between cold air at altitude and high water temperatures, which is exactly what is currently happening in the sea around the Balearic Islands. The amount of rain during such storms is enormous, warn weather experts; up to 400 liters per square meter can fall.
Medicanes, tropical storm-like low-pressure systems in the Mediterranean, usually occur in the fall
A Medicane (a portmanteau of Mediterranean hurricane) is a tropical storm-like low-pressure system in the Mediterranean. This type of Mediterranean low-pressure system is thought to occur about once a year. Medicanes usually form in the fall, when cold air from the temperate latitudes flows towards the equator and a so-called cut-off low forms in the higher air layers.
The air mass near the sea, which is humid due to evaporation from the still relatively warm Mediterranean, condenses and forms the cloud vortex in the course of the convection caused by the high-altitude low pressure system. The eye of this vortex system forms in a similar way to that in the tropics, through the downward movement, with cloud dissipation in the low-pressure center, which warms up in the process.
There have already been several such storms in Mallorca, and SeaHelp operations center reports that such weather phenomena “around August 15th of each year” have recently become nothing out of the ordinary in the Balearic Islands. Sports skippers should be prepared for this and be suitably prepared. With the “Caribbean temperatures”, the danger of severe storms and thunderstorms increases.
And: the storm on Wednesday (classified according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale for tropical cyclones: Mediterranean Tropical Storm with 64 to 111 km/h) could be just a taste of what is to come in the fall. Or to put it another way: vacationers in Mallorca – whether they are traveling by boat or not – must be prepared for further storms until the end of the season.
