A recently published scientific study has shown that wind current patterns in Earth's atmosphere are undergoing major changes that will intensify winds and sandstorms across the Arab region and the Mediterranean basin, particularly in winter. These changes are expected to have profound effects on water and food security, as well as the future of clean energy projects in the region.
اضافة اعلان
Wind plays a vital role in shaping weather patterns, helping distribute heat and moisture across different regions. Dr. Adel Salhi, professor of geography at Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tetouan, Morocco, told Al Jazeera Net that wind is the engine that moves heat, humidity, and dust across the planet. It drives clouds, distributes rainfall, and regulates water evaporation from soil and seas — and any shift in it triggers a chain of changes affecting agriculture, water, and even the spread of pollutants, according to what was published on the Al Jazeera Net website.
The researcher gives an example of dust particles blown from the Sahara that sometimes cross the Atlantic Ocean to feed the Amazon rainforest with rare minerals — a journey that begins with a gust of wind over the desert and ends thousands of kilometers away.
But what's driving these wind systems to shift? The answer, according to Salhi, lies in a single physical mechanism with two faces — occurring as two climatic phenomena that are really two sides of the same process.
The first phenomenon is a gradual expansion of the "Hadley cell," the large-scale atmospheric circulation system that carries warm air from tropical regions toward subtropical latitudes, then sends it back down toward the surface, forming dry high-pressure belts. This expansion, driven by increased evaporation resulting from rising temperatures at the equator, is pushing winds to intensify over the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central Asia.
The second phenomenon is accelerated warming in the Arctic, occurring two to three times faster than the global average, which weakens the temperature contrast between the pole and tropical regions, in turn weakening winds over Canada, Siberia, and northern Europe.
In terms of precise statistics, the researchers found that the change in Africa carries a strong human-influence signature, with the long-term trend explaining around 42% of annual variability, while natural internal fluctuations dominate more than 95% of the change in North America and Asia — meaning the human fingerprint on shifting wind patterns is concentrated in certain regions rather than others, according to the study.
The results clearly showed, according to Salhi, that changes have occurred in wind movement over the past four decades in the Earth's atmosphere, including in the Middle East and North Africa region.
These changes over the region took the form of a cumulative increase of roughly 5% to 8% in wind intensity along the continuous belt of ascending winds stretching from the western Sahara to the deserts of Central Asia in the east, passing through the Sahel, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Iranian plateau, over 44 years.
He added that this increase in wind intensity has a distinctly wintertime character, with winter changes being two to three times greater than their summer counterparts — meaning that northern winds over Iraq and the Gulf, northwesterly winds, and the dry Harmattan winds over the African Sahel are now blowing more frequently specifically during the colder months.
In other words, the expansion of the Hadley cell toward the northern tropics is pushing high-pressure atmospheric belts toward the Arab region, causing an increase in wind and drought, along with the severe pressure these place on water and agricultural resources.
Wide-Ranging Effects on Water, Food, and Energy
The impact of these changes extends to water and food security, as well as the future of clean energy projects in the region. The professor of geography at Abdelmalek Essaadi University revealed that winds not exceeding 8 to 12 meters per second, if sustained for continuous hours during the grain-filling season in summer, are enough to cause "crop lodging" — a permanent bending of wheat and barley stalks that can result in a 40% loss of crops in the most exposed areas.
The impact of these changes will worsen in the future, according to the researcher, as what has been observed "is not a passing phenomenon, but reflects an actual reorganization of the major atmospheric circulation mechanism," suggesting that its effects on water, agriculture, and energy will accumulate unless the pathways of global warming itself change.
