Ciclogénesis intensas en la cuenca occidental del Mediterráneo y temperatura superficial del mar: Modelización y evaluación de las áreas de recarga

Doctoral thesis in Spanish. Torrentiality is a known feature of rainfall in the Western Mediterranean. As part of a typical Mediterranean climate, heavy rain events are recorded in many areas of the Western Mediterranean that cause major economic damage and even sometimes human casualties. The Mediterranean basin is formed by a deep and almost closed sea and surrounded by a series of mountain ranges, especially in its western basin. This configuration favours the development of its own atmospheric dynamic behaviour. A main factor in the genesis and development of torrential rainfall are the ocean and atmosphere exchanges of moisture and heat that can destabilize the air mass that travels over the sea. The Mediterranean is a semi-enclosed sea with its own oceanic circulation and little exchange of water masses with other seas. A surface temperature climatology of the Mediterranean has been built from satellite data so its spatial distribution patterns have been studied. As a result of this analysis, we have determined the existence of two main distribution modes for sea surface temperature in winter and summer, with transitional periods in spring and autumn. From the knowledge of sea surface temperature climatology and, especially, from its spatial distribution three heavy precipitation events have been selected in Valencia to study the effect of different sea temperature distributions in the simulation of torrential rains. To this end, we selected rainfall events for winter and summer regimes and for fall transition. For all events, a simulation with the unperturbed sea surface temperature data was performed as control simulation. Then, simulations of each event were run in which sea surface temperature was modified in areas along the air mass path. It has been found that the variation of sea surface temperature in certain areas, indicated by its spatial distribution scheme, causes significant changes in the precipitation accumulated in the simulation. Therefore, the existence of recharge areas where the air-sea interaction favours the development of torrential rainfall in different parts of the Mediterranean, in this case, Valencia, has been show