Milan – Lombardy battered by bad weather. Once again. Flooding in the Brescia and Bergamo areas, hail and tornadoes in the Lodi area and Pavia, wind damage in the Mantua area. While in Milan, according to the latest report from the Duomo Meteorological Observatory, spring 2024 will be remembered as the rainiest ever: or at least, in the last 128 years, i.e. since the records have been available.
Claudia Pasquero is a professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Milan Bicocca: what’s happening?
“Generally the stratospheric polar vortex holds the air at high latitudes: if it breaks, it does so in winter, causing masses of polar air to descend towards low latitudes. This year, however, its breaking occurred later, in spring precisely, creating anomalies for this season, with temperatures a little lower than normal and the arrival of many disturbances. The fact is that while the polar air slides down at the same time there is air from low latitudes that rises towards the north, causing “fronts” (in meteorology it indicates a contact surface between two air masses with different characteristics, ed.) which are the ideal condition for the occurrence of precipitation and rain”.
Is it all climate change’s fault?
“There is no indication that the breakdown of the polar vortex is influenced by climate change. However, if we talk about the intensity of rainfall, it is clear that it is increasing due to global warming and the watering down of the air.”
What do you mean?
“If the average temperature of the planet increases, the evaporation of water in the seas also increases. Since the atmosphere contains more water, it rains more. It is a phenomenon that is recorded globally.”
Is it normal that in Giussago, in the province of Pavia, a tornado razed an entire forest to the ground?
“In Italy, on average, about a hundred tornadoes occur every year. For all we know, it is possible that they are becoming more intense, due to greater instability in the atmosphere, a condition that favors these phenomena. As regards the frequency, however, we have no indications of any changes.”
What summer should we expect from a meteorological point of view?
“It is very difficult to make seasonal forecasts, particularly if we are talking about rainfall. What I can say instead is, if we are talking about temperatures, that particularly hot summers are generally associated with a dry spring. The reason is that the earth’s soil is if it’s dry it gets warmer while if it’s wet it stays colder. Now, since the spring of 2024 was characterized by numerous rains, we should reasonably expect that the intense summer heat could be mitigated somewhat Let’s not forget that May 2024 was the hottest ever recorded globally since scientific records began, marking the 12th consecutive month in which the global average temperature reached a record value for the corresponding month. anomaly is due to the fact that anthropogenic global warming and El Niño, the pronounced warming of the surface waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, have overlapped. It is not a given that next year will set a new record, without El Niño, but this does not mean that we have solved the problem of global warming, on the contrary.”
