Spain is still digging itself out after the biggest snowstorm that hit the Mediterranean country in 50 years hit the capital, Madrid and surrounding regions over the weekend, disrupting the transit and efforts to spread coronavirus vaccines and caused at least four deaths.
Most of the snow from Storm Filomena started falling on Friday night, leaving 20 centimeters in the capital and nearby provinces by the end of Saturday.
Railroad services in some areas have been suspended, and the New York Times reported that 12,500 kilometers of roads were closed or disrupted. Firefighters, army members and emergency crew members worked from Friday to Saturday to clear runways and roads, freeing more than 1,500 people trapped in icy cars.
Although hundreds of roads were cleared by Sunday and outbound flights resumed at Madrid-Barajas airport, the Associated Press reported that roads in parts of the country were still largely blocked, with officials warning that the country was not yet in public. .
“A week of extreme cold is coming and it will turn all the snow on the ground into ice, increasing the risk,” Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told reporters on Sunday. “The storm is bringing a cold wave that could push the temperature to record levels,” he added.
At least four people have been killed in the storm. Two homeless people have died as a result of exposure – one near Madrid and another in Calatayud, a city in the north-east of the country. A woman and a man also drowned after their car was swept away in floods when a river burst near the southern city of Malaga.
The government on Sunday warned people to stay off the roads as much as possible, the AP reported, saying although all those trapped in their vehicles were rescued, many abandoned vehicles remained on the roads.
Many Spaniards took advantage of the snow to enjoy winter fun. On social media, scenes of Spaniards in the streets, happily engaging in massive snowball fights, circulated.
Some revealers were even seen skiing through Madrid’s streets.
What is behind the historic snow of Spain?
Although Spanish reports predicted snow, few people expected it to be so intense.
Rubén del Campo, a spokesman for Spain’s meteorological office, Aemet, told reporters that “you will probably have to look back at the 1970s for snowfall of a similar magnitude in and around the capital.”
It can be incredibly difficult to determine exactly what combination of factors caused this (or any) extreme weather event, but experts I spoke to said that Filomena’s historical snowfall could have happened because high humidity levels coupled with temperatures that is perfect for snow, at just the right time.
In general, the warmer the air, the more moisture it can hold, which increases the precipitation potential. It is possible that the air before Filomena contains more moisture and then meets the “Goldilocks conditions” of about 28 ° F to 32 ° F, which are necessary to keep snowfall on the earth’s surface.
As Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research told me: ‘Maximum snow occurs when surface temperatures are around 28 degrees Fahrenheit and there is a lot of moisture flowing from the oceans into the storm, where moisture is plentiful and more than it used to be due to global warming.’
In the case of Filomena, Trenberth added, “conditions were just right.”
However, this does not necessarily mean that climate change is directly responsible for Spain’s snowstorm.
“It’s not possible to associate this one storm with anything directly related to climate change,” Robinson, of Rutgers, told me. “However, it has been said that nowadays there is nothing in the weather world where climate change does not have the underlying impact on what is happening.”