Diabatic influences on current and future hazardous Mediterranean cyclones

The Mediterranean basin is home to diverse storms from weak systems generated by air interacting with mountains to intense cyclones (also termed "depressions"). A subset of cyclones, medicanes (Mediterranean hurricanes), resemble hurricanes and can be particularly devastating; e.g., the winds of medicane Ianos were equivalent to a category two hurricane on its landfall in Greece in 2020 causing infrastructure damage and fatalities. Mediterranean cyclones have been far less studied than their relatives crossing the North Atlantic, despite being responsible for up to 80% of the local winter-time extreme precipitation. They are more challenging to forecast due to their typically smaller scale and shorter lifetime; the effects of the nearby mountains and warm, semi-enclosed Mediterranean Sea on their development and impacts; and the influence of both the subtropical and extratropical climatic zones. These cyclones are driven by interactions between processes occurring at different spatial scales: fluxes of heat and moisture from the ocean surface together with latent heat fluxes from deep convective clouds (so-called diabatic processes), and planetary-scale deviations of the polar jet at about 10km altitude that cause the intruding air streamers that commonly precede their genesis. Studies indicate that the Mediterranean region is particularly vulnerable to climate change and as the climate warms there will likely be fewer, but more hazardous, medicanes. We propose to generate new knowledge of the role of diabatic processes in driving the development of hazardous Mediterranean cyclones in both the current and future climate.

The aims are to

* Quantify the influence of diabatic processes on intense Mediterranean cyclones and determine how they modify the track and intensity of cyclones and their hazardous winds and rainfall;
* Simulate and analyse changes in plausible worst case Mediterranean cyclones with climate change and quantify the changing importance of...