Another Severe Winter Storm

Greenish leaves still cling to the tree out front, flies continue to buzz against the window — the new normal here in Israel — but that is not the whole story. Strong temperature contrasts are fueling another major storm.

The storm is set to pummel the country on Friday, with effects lingering into Sunday. The most severe impacts are expected Friday afternoon: extremely heavy rainfall, strong winds, and gusts along the coast that could exceed 75 kilometers per hour, as well as in higher, hilly, and mountainous regions.  Rainfall should be heaviest up north, closer to the storm, but flooding is still possible in areas south of Jerusalem, all the way to the southern Negev.

The storm will approach from the northwest before moving east of Cyprus late Friday. A lighter round of precipitation is possible on Shabbat, and machine-learning–based forecast models are already hinting at yet another strong storm early next week.

For now, however, it is 18 degrees Celsius in Jerusalem, and here in Gush Etzion I have yet to see frost cover the ground. The flies seem pleased; plants that depend on sufficient cold hours are not. The tree outside needs to shed its leaves so that new ones can emerge in spring.

The last storm dropped more than 25 millimeters — about an inch — of rain in just a few nighttime hours, another increasingly familiar consequence of global warming. While growing seasons may lengthen in some regions, the climate system does not respond in just one way to warming. Stronger storms, more frequent heat waves, prolonged droughts, and more extreme weather events are all part of the same global signal. To claim that “global warming is good for the planet” is, at best, hopeful extrapolation. Many would — and do — disagree.