The powerful storm Danielthat It has caused at least 6,872 deaths and more than 10,000 missing in northeastern Libyahas left more to the south lakes in the middle of the desert, so large that they are visible from space. Flooded areas in the eastern Libyan desert have been captured in images compared by the Sentinel satellite 2 of the European Copernicus program, taken on September 2 and 12.

The first shows the desert territory south of Cyrenaica completely covered by sand. Ten days later, wide flooded channels appear that run through the desert towards the south, creating in some cases large lakes of intense blue color. Some exceed the ten kilometers long.

In the eastern desert of Libya, rainfall reaches an average that in some cases does not reach 50 millimeters per year. Storm Daniel is a long-lived Mediterranean cyclone that has been active for More than a week since it formed as a low pressure weather system around September 4.

“Events like Storm Daniel They are relatively rare and they tend to occur more frequently in the western part of the Mediterranean Sea than in the arid Libyan coast. It is more difficult to understand the potential for catastrophic extreme events in an arid climate, where rainfall is few and far between, which makes designing and building resilient infrastructure a challenge,” said the professor of Climate Risk and Resilience at the University of Reading Liz Stephens.