Heat waves, droughts and heavy rain are Istanbul's 'new normal'

Heat waves, droughts and heavy rainfall are the "new normal" in Istanbul, Professor Levent Kurnaz has told the Hürriyet Daily News, adding that the intense storms that hit the city twice last month were the result of climate change.  

"The eastern Mediterranean area is one of the hottest spots on the planet. Few places in the world will bear the brunt of this climate change as much as us," said Kurnaz, the director of the Center for Climate Change and Policy Studies at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University.

Istanbul recently witnessed extremely heavy rain and flash flooding twice in one week. What happened? Are we facing something new?

It rained. That's it. It rained very heavily. There is nothing magical about what happened; there are lots of reasons for it.

But was it normal?

Actually it has rained like this before. This is nothing that has not been seen before, though the intensity is much higher. In 2009 in Istanbul we got something like 180 kg of rain per square meter within six hours.

This time the first storm was about 80 kg per square meters in two hours and the last one was 35-40 kg per square meter in 20 minutes. Whenever we say it's "supercell rain" people think it's something special.

But this is actually something we know. It has rained like this before, but the intensity is getting higher and higher. 

Right before the storm the surface temperature of the Marmara Sea was about three degrees higher than normal. Therefore a mass of warm air moving through the Marmara Sea gathered all the moisture from the sea and dumped it right over Istanbul. That huge cell with lots of moisture from the Marmara Sea is called a "supercell."