Earlier this month, I finally got to see the Odyssey with my family. We waited a few weeks to see the juggernaut film in IMAX. As I watched the movie, flashbacks to high school swirled in my head as characters, imagery, and storylines from the poem by Homer unfolded. Earlier this week, colleagues in my field were talking about the possibility of a rare type of storm in the Mediterranean Sea called a “medicane.” I’ll explain what that is shortly. It also prompted to head down a humanities - atmospheric sciences rabbit hole to reflect on the weather and the Odyssey .

What Is A Medicane And Did Odysseus Experience One?

“The term medicane, short for Mediterranean hurricane, was coined just two decades ago to describe tropical cyclone–like storms forming over the Mediterranean Sea,” noted to the European Space Agency website. “While not typically as common or as powerful as their hurricane cousins, they can still generate destructive winds, severe flooding and dangerous storm surges – posing a significant threat to more than 500 million people living around the Mediterranean basin, as well as leading to substantial economic losses for affected countries,” It went on to say.

The water temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea have been particular hot this season. In the map above, the anomalously warm waters associated with the El Niño in the eastern-Central Pacific and the Mediterranean Sea, respectively, stand out. Like hurricanes, medicanes feed on warm water but also derive energy from the atmosphere like non-tropical storm systems. “In the past, notable medicanes include Cyclone (or Medicane) Ianos (Greece in September 2020), the strongest on record. It peaked as the equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane,” according to The Weather Network website .

They only happen about three times a year, and there were rumblings that one might form this week. Forecasters were keeping an eye on an area of low pressure system northeast of Libya. The chances of the storm seem to have dwindled though evidence of the storm system is still apparent in weather satellite imagery as of Thursday morning.

Meteorology In The Odyssey

Mediterranean weather was a central character in the Odyssey as heat was in Spike Lee’s epic film, “Do The Right Thing.” I started reflecting on what I saw from the film and remembered from the movie. It is important to remember that Hollywood films are not documentaries. They take certain creative liberties. As an atmospheric scientist, I have to remind myself of that fact when I watch movies like Twister .

Randall Cerveny is a colleague, noted geographer and climatologist at Arizona State University. “My work on the Odyssey examined it from the viewpoint of what ‘real meteorological’ knowledge can we gleam from it -- and I argued that the position of ships as discussed by Homer at the beginning of the epic when they are all sunk (except for Odysseus’ ship which is torn off course) could be compared to the passage of a modern cold across the Aegean Sea,” Cerveny told me in an email. “Fortunately Odysseus never had to encounter the wrath of a medicane,” He continued.

Cerveny knows about extreme weather and climate. He serves as Weather and Climate Extremes Rapporteur for the World Meteorological Organization. In 1993, he published a meteorological assessment of Homer’s Odyssey in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , one of the most respected peer-reviewed journals in my field. Cerveny applied accepted meteorological theories to voyages of the fleets to assess whether plausible weather scenarios were captured by Homer and perhaps extend climatological records in the region. Cerveny drew several conclusions in the paper:

  • Nothing beyond the limits of known meteorological theory happened during the first roughly three weeks following the departure from Troy by the six fleets.
  • Tragedies faced by the Achaeans were possibly linked to a cyclonic storm during early summer though not a medicane.
  • One of, if not, the earliest accounts of a microburst was recorded as Odysseus sailed away from the island of Calypso. Homer described a sudden storm caused by Poseidon that impacted the small raft. “A microburst is a localized column of sinking air (downdraft) within a thunderstorm and is usually less than or equal to 2.5 miles in diameter,” as defined by the National Weather Service website .

Cerveny anchored his analysis in the Polar Front Theory . What’s that? It is, “A theory originated by the Scandinavian school of meteorologists whereby a polar front, separating air masses of polar and tropical origin, gives rise to cyclonic disturbances that intensify and travel along the front, passing through various phases of a characteristic life history,” according to the Glossary of the American Meteorological Society . Storms like the one captured by satellite imagery below in 2016 is an example of what Odysseus and his peers could have faced.

There are many other meteorological factors that appeared in the story. The mountains and coastal terrain can produce many local wind systems such as sea-land breezes and mountain-valley breezes. If you have ever taken a trip to the beach, you are familiar with a sea breeze. During the daytime hours, the land heats up faster than the water because it has a smaller heat capacity. That difference creates an onshore wind system. At night, the wind blows offshore as the land cools rapidly.

As I watched the storyline play out with the cattle of Helios on the island of Thrinacia, thoughts of the sea breeze circulation came to mind, though Odysseus and his men were stuck with “bad winds” for weeks. The sea breeze circulation often reverses on a daily cycle so, perhaps something else was at play.

Though not necessarily a weather event, another geohazard feature in the Odyssey was a whirlpool. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as, “A small area of the sea or other water in which there is a powerful, circular current of water that can pull objects down into its center. In the mythology of the Odyssey, Scylla was presented as a six-headed sea monster in a cliffside cave. Charybdis was some type of entity under a rock under the sea. Charybdis appeared as a large whirlpool. One of the most famous whirlpools, ”Old Sow," is located in the Bay of Bunday near Maine.

Oddly after seeing the movie, I left the theater humming the line about Scylla and Charybis from the song “ Wrapped Around Your Finger ” by Sting.