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Study of the Western Black Sea Storms with a Focus on the Storms Caused by Cyclones of North African Origin

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Abstract

We present a study of the Black Sea storms, using a long hindcast of the western Black Sea wind waves. The goal of the work is to study the trends in the storminess indicators. We identify 238 storms with significant wave height above 4 m for the period 1900–2015. We study the cyclogenetic regions of the cyclones causing these storms and focus specifically on the Black Sea storms associated with cyclones originating over the Gulf of Sidra and the adjacent areas. We also identify which of these storms are associated with the so-called explosive cyclogenesis (with deepening rate above 1 Bergeron) and find that 3 out of 5 cases of severe Black Sea storms associated with explosive cyclones are caused by cyclones originating in the Gulf of Sidra. We find no evidence of steady trends in the western Black Sea storminess.

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Acknowledgements

Since the study was based on free of charge data and open source software, the authors would like to express their deep gratitude to all institutions (ECMWF, NOAA, NCEP-NCAR, Unidata, MPI-M and all others) and individual enthusiasts. This study would not have been possible without their innovative data services and tools. We are grateful to Dr. Anna Kortcheva for the useful discussions. We are also grateful to Ivan Tsonevsky from ECMWF for the valuable comments. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers which helped us to improve the paper significantly. We also thank Dr. Christina Andreeva for proof-reading the manuscript.

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  1. National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (NIMH-BAS), Boulevard Tsarigrasko Shose 66, 1784, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Vasko Galabov & Hristo Chervenkov

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  1. Vasko Galabov
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  2. Hristo Chervenkov
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Correspondence to Vasko Galabov.

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Galabov, V., Chervenkov, H. Study of the Western Black Sea Storms with a Focus on the Storms Caused by Cyclones of North African Origin. Pure Appl. Geophys. 175, 3779–3799 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-018-1844-7

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