The Arab world is currently exposed to a harsh cold wave that some countries have never seen before, in Syria, Jordan and Libya, and snow has reached areas where it has not appeared for many years, and in Lebanon, cold storms have caused electricity cuts in several regions.
In Egypt, a severe wave of bad weather swept the country, including heavy rain with a record low day and night temperatures, which prompted the country to stop some tourism activities, especially in the Sinai Peninsula.
A new Arab homeland
Cold waves are periods of time that witness a sudden drop in temperatures below their known levels in a particular region, and they usually occur in winter, and are associated with snowfall.
Because of the natural changes in the weather, it is expected that cold waves of different degrees of intensity will occur almost anywhere, but what always draws the attention of scientists is the rates of occurrence of these types of waves.
To understand the idea more closely to reality, let us, for example, consider what is happening now in the city of Ain Al-Safra in the Algerian state of ostrich, where the city witnessed heavy snowfall 3 times, all of which occurred within the last 5 years: 2017, 2018 and 2021.
Before the turn of the millennium, the Arab world was not at a time with so many climate disturbances
And before the turn of the millennium, the Arab world was not on time with so many climatic disturbances, and we are talking here about a wide range of heat waves, cold waves and dust storms.
For example, in September 2015, an exceptional sandstorm hit the Middle East, causing deaths and the suspension of public life.
Meanwhile, a Princeton University research team has been studying it, revealing that the results reveal that climate change - along with other factors - was a major cause of it.
The study indicated droughts that covered several regions in the Arab world, especially that the summer of 2015 was unprecedentedly hot, and the amount of dust available to the storm increased, which exacerbated its impact.
Rates are high
In fact, the last 7 years have been the hottest in the history of global average temperature measurements, but could global warming cause cold waves?
A team of scientists believes that rising global average temperatures help in causing greater rates of various climate disturbances, including cold waves.
For example, an international research team observed in 2019 that unusually warm temperatures in the Arctic could destabilize the cold polar vortex that is circling above, causing some of its impact to travel deeper distances from west to east, and this study is published. In the journal Nature Climate Change.
On the one hand, computer simulations in 2016 predicted that with rising Arctic average temperatures, we could expect an increase in the frequency and intensity of cold waves in the temperate northern regions for the next few years.
Scientists predicted, with the occurrence of a "sudden stratospheric warming" last month, the emergence of a severe cold wave in separate areas (European)
In addition, a joint research team from several British universities had indicated that the stratosphere of the Earth's atmosphere is experiencing - beginning on January 5, 2021 - an unusual climatic condition called "sudden stratospheric warming", which made the team see that it may It causes a severe cold wave during the weeks following this date, in separate regions of the world, and we were on Al-Jazeera.net We covered the study of this team in a previous report.
This event has repeated an average of 40 times over the past 60 years, and it can - in combination with climate change - raise the rates of severe cold waves, and send them to regions deeper south, and into the Arab world.