Context: Recently, Scientists have warned that extra-tropical storms in the Mediterranean Sea, known as ‘Medicanes’ or ‘Mediterranean Hurricanes’, could become more frequent due to human-induced climate change.
About the Medicanes

• Medicanes might become more frequent owing to global warming due to anthropogenic climate change.
• Medicanes might increase threat from storms for already vulnerable populations living in North Africa, possibly triggering human migration.
• They could also be a menace for European countries like Italy and Greece.
• Medicanes occur more in colder waters than tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons. Hence, the cores of these storms are also cold, as compared to the warm cores of tropical cyclones.
• Warmer cores tend to carry more moisture (hence rainfall), are bigger in size and have swifter winds.
• Sometimes, warm-cored tropical cyclones transform into cold-cored extratropical cyclones and in rare cases, the opposite can also happen.

Mediterranean Sea

• Mediterranean Sea is an intercontinental sea that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to Asia on the east and separates Europe from Africa.
• It has often been called the incubator of Western civilization.  
• The Mediterranean Sea, including the Sea of Marmara, occupies an area of approximately 2,510,000 square km.
• The western extremity of the Mediterranean Sea connects with the Atlantic Ocean by the narrow channel of the Strait of Gibraltar.
• To the northeast the Mediterranean is connected with Black Sea through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Bosporus.
• To the southeast it is connected with the Red Sea by the Suez Canal.
• The Mediterranean is a generally dry, evaporative sea and cyclonic storms don’t grow as much rain and can be hard to detect.

Key facts

• The rare event of an extra tropical cyclone becoming a tropical cyclone happens because of warmer-than-usual waters in the Mediterranean Sea. 
• A La Niña produces more rain in the central eastern part, where most of the Mediterranean cyclones develop.