“Incredible amounts of rain, the likes of which I have never seen before». With these words, he comments on the extreme weather phenomena that Greece has been experiencing in recent days, mainly in the region of Thessaly, the meteorologist of the public network ZDF Ezden Terli.«No region can face this mass of rain without disaster. The overheated Mediterranean is exacerbating the situation,” he notes on the X platform.

“These are amounts of rain that are extremely rare based on the statistics we collect. It’s really an extreme phenomenon” he observes from his side Felix Dietz from the German Weather Servicenoting that the intensity of the weather phenomena in Greece in the last two days is a “random interaction of many factors”.

Felix Dietz even explains that the constantly warming air and high temperatures in the waters of the Mediterranean this summer lead to the evaporation of larger masses of water. These amounts of water then fall as rain, in this case in the form of devastating floods.

The comparison with the valley of Ar

As the MDR network observes in the view of most meteorologists, it is human-caused climate change that increases the occurrence of increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

And Germany was faced with devastating floods in the Ar valley in July 2021, which left behind 134 dead and incalculable material damage. The Cologne newspaper Kölner Stadt Anzeiger recalls that then only 100 to 200 liters of water per sq.m. were recorded. In Greece, on the contrary, they were recorded up to 754 liters of water per sq.m. the last two days.

But of interest is the observation of German meteorologist Markus Uebe, also from the German Meteorological Service, who focuses on another factor: geographical location. In the valley of Ar there was no outlet for the rainwater. On the other hand, in many areas of Greece, the amounts of “surplus” water end up in the sea, the German meteorologist points out.