In recent days, when the mainland has been raining and snowing on a large scale and the larger blizzard has been aimed at many places in the central and eastern regions, on the Mediterranean coast at the other end of the Eurasian continent, fierce weather has rarely hit - Greece, Turkey and other places on the Mediterranean coast have recently encountered heavy heavy snow - extraordinarily heavy snow attacks. For example, media photos show that on January 24, local time, one of the greek landmarks, the Parthenon in Athens was submerged in snowflakes.
Local monitoring data show that 30-40 cm of snow has generally appeared in many parts of Greece, and there have been 24-hour 110 mm sharp rain and snow at some sites in Greece, most of which is snow, which is the only extraordinarily large snow in local history. Under the onslaught of heavy snowfall, the Greek capital of Athens was paralyzed by a series of traffic chaos caused by snow and even some road traffic, and flights were also affected.
Turkey's blizzards are also very fierce, meteorological bureau data show that turkey suffered heavy snowstorms in many parts of the country, is a rare heavy snowstorm process in the country's history, the Turkish capital Istanbul and the coast of the Sea of Marmara have also been affected by the snow, Istanbul's famous landmark Hagia Sophia was whitewashed in the snow, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu declared, "It was a difficult night", and urged people not to leave home. He said that the snow in parts of Istanbul has reached a thickness of 80-85 centimeters, close to 1 meter deep, and is nearly paralyzed at one point in a snowstorm. In addition, according to turkey's meteorological department, the country's southern Mediterranean coast is the first snowfall since 1993.
Turkey and Greece belong to the Mediterranean climate, this climate type is characterized by subtropical high pressure/trade wind belt and west wind belt alternate control, hot and dry summers, mild and rainy winters. Heavy snowfalls like this are rare, and many places have broken local records. There is even an extremely rare "snow tornado" in it — surveillance video shows a tornado sticking out of the lead-gray blizzard cloud system to ground, causing some damage and impact. Clear imagery shows that this is a pure typical tornado. The coexistence of such a typical tornado and such a large ice and snow is quite unusual.
Then some netizens have to ask: Is this a climate anomaly? The culprit of this record-breaking blizzard was the product of the violent oscillations of the westerly wind belt over the Mediterranean Sea, which eventually formed a severe cold vortex and condensed the water vapor of the Mediterranean into strong rain and snow and dumped it in Greece and Turkey. Of course, the westerly wind belt near the Mediterranean Sea is equivalent to the upper reaches of the mainland, and this energy may also be transmitted downstream, which may strengthen the southern branch trough south of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which may also indirectly make the mainland more water vapor, rain and snow will be more and stronger.
Therefore, after the record-breaking snowstorms in Greece and Turkey, the mainland still needs to continue to be vigilant against extreme weather. Of course, this may also be one of the manifestations of the abnormal climate of the Northern Hemisphere this winter.