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An unprecedented nine named storms brought torrents of rainfall along with swift winds to the western Mediterranean region, especially Spain, Portugal and Morocco between January 16 and February 17, 2026. The rainfall was as high as a year’s worth of downpours in a matter of days in some parts of Spain.
Observational analysis of the most extreme rainfall over the most affected regions by a group of scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium showed that warming made the rainfall more intense, but climate models did not recreate the trend, showing gaps in their efficacy.
WWA, a global network of climate scientists, conducts ‘attribution studies’ to understand and quantify the role of human-induced climate change in the occurrence, frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
The scientists were also able to ascertain that the series of fierce storms were caused by a blocking pattern in the upper atmosphere whose correlation to warming and consequent climate change remains an active area of research.
The storms led to around 50 deaths with infrastructure and livelihood losses in billions of Euros in the three countries. In Spain, 12,400 evacuations to safer places were carried out due to flooding and strong winds, with the overall affected population numbering around 115,000. These were mainly concentrated in the Sierra De Cadiz area of southwest Spain. One person lost their life in the first storm, Harry that affected the country on January 16. The Spanish government has committed 7 billion Euros in aid for the region with the regional Andalusian region promising another 1.78 billion Euros.
In Portugal, six people lost their lives during Storm Kristin that hit the country on January 27 with peak wind speeds of 202 km/hr. The storm led to power outage for around one million people and structural damages. The Government of Portugal has already committed 3.5 billion Euros for reconstruction.
In northern Morocco where socio economic vulnerabilities of the people are steeper than in Spain and Portugal, flooding from the storms caused 43 deaths, displaced 3,00,000 people and inundated 110,000 homes. The Moroccan government has pledged a recovery plan of 280 million Euros.
The WWA study focused on the most affected regions of northern Portugal/northwest Spain, southern Portugal/southwest Spain and northern Morocco. The researchers analysed one day maximum rainfall event from October to March and a 90-day maximum rainfall event in the same time period.
They found that the return period of the extreme rainfall event was around 40 years in the southern regions and five years in the northern regions. At a more localised level, the event is much rarer with a return period of 100 years. The Grazalema region of southern Spain received 581 mm of rainfall in 24 hours on February 5 and the accumulated rainfall between January 1 and February 9 was 2,527 mm which is more than 2.5 times the previous record for the same duration set in early 2009.
The analysis of observations from 1950 onwards showed that the one-day maximum rainfall event increased in intensity by 36 per cent in the southern region and around 29 per cent in the northern region. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which is the natural climatic pattern in the region and brings rainfall during this period, also added 5 per cent to the intensity of rains in the southern region and 2 per cent in the northern region.
When the scientists ran the observational data through climate models to determine the role played by warming, they could not reproduce the trend in the southern region while the trend in the northern region was weaker than the observed trends. The increase was only 11 per cent in the northern region.
During an NAO event, the sea level pressure over the North Atlantic and northern Europe is lower. It is higher over the subtropics and the Mediterranean. This phenomenon is usually associated with heavy rainfall and snowfall over northern and northwestern Europe.
The structure of the current NAO event was similar to past events but much stronger in magnitude, according to the study. This showed that while these storms were forming and impacting the affected regions, the atmosphere was unstable with enormous availability of moisture. This created the ideal conditions for the extreme rainfall and strong winds.
“Densely populated urban centres, particularly where tourism-driven development has expanded into floodplains, as well as highly exposed, low-lying, sandy and eroding coastal towns, faced particularly high levels of exposure,” according to the study.
“In Morocco, high exposure was further compounded by social vulnerability, with a number of people living in informal settlements where housing quality, infrastructure and access to services are often limited. These underlying exposure and vulnerability factors significantly increased the potential for impacts when the hazard occurred,” the study authors noted.
“Whether it is the 11 per cent increase we’ve been able to directly attribute to human activities, such as our burning of fossil fuels, or the much higher trends we see on the ground over the decades, we’re confident that climate change makes these intense downpours more severe,” Friederike Otto, professor of Climate Science at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, said in a statement.
“The sheer volume of water we’ve seen in places like Grazalema and during this succession of storms is staggering. This study confirms that the warmer atmosphere being created by our collective carbon emissions is resulting in a pattern of more extreme, more intense rainfall that policymakers need to prepare and adapt for to protect lives, livelihoods and infrastructure in our region,” said David García-García, from the Satellite Geodesy for Earth Observation and Climate Studies, Department of Applied Mathematics and Aerospace Engineering, University of Alicante, Spain.