The Lee Weather team goes across the pond to Europe for this episode for a discussion about an unusual type of storm. They look like a hurricane, have nearly the same characters of a hurricane, and now even have names like hurricanes. Called medicanes, they're the Mediterranean Sea's biggest weather beast. 
The Lee Weather team speaks to Kostas Lagouvardos, Research Director at the National Observatory of Athens.
Lagouvardos has studied medicanes since the 1990s, is the foremost authority on the storms, and became the first person to name them. Naming is now done by the Greek government, similar to how hurricanes are named in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. 
After a powerful storm, Ianos, caused death and devastation in September 2020, his research published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society sparked more interest in the topic. 
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About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprises National Weather Podcast. We are in 77 newsrooms all across the country, all corners of the country, but we are not talking about the United States today. We are going across the pond over to Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to talk about Medicaid. Sounds like a hurricane.
All north is like a hurricane, but it's what they see in the Mediterranean Sea. We are going to chat with Dr. Kostas legal bartels research director from the National Observatory in Athens, Greece. All about it. You know, guys, I was I'll get through the Bolton the American Meteorological Society. Shout out to the American Meteorological Society. They they do wonders for the weather community.
We love being a part of it. And I saw this this piece called Eno's A Hurricane in the Mediterranean. I said, Jesus said, you know, I feel like this would be a good podcast topic because a lot of us can relate to Hurricane. We've either been in one or we've seen plenty of it, you know, on our screens, but it's a little different.
You don't expect hurricanes in the Mediterranean and there's some differences. But Kostas is going to talk to us about those differences. You know, I think I think he did a good job explaining it. But I'll turn it over to my weather friends here across the country, Sean Sublette, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Matt Hollander over in the Midwest West.
I'll start with you, Matt, here. Did you know much about medications before this topic? No, not until you brought it up. I was like. Hurricanes in the Mediterranean, that that's new to me. But this isn't a new thing. And I would been doing like, Oh, no, these have occurred before. But the difference is it really caught everybody's attention in 2020 when they had an intense well, they actually reached Category two hurricane strength most of the time was going tropical storms.
There have been a few they've been a Category one strength. But a lot of times they stay out in the water. And so they're not impacts land. They tend to be weak. But that seems to be changing and that's what we're back. And I'm on the podcast because they had one that made landfall with category due strength. Then suddenly there are big impacts and it looks like there might be a trend that way in the increasing intensity.
So we might have to start paying attention to them a little bit closer in the future. And so you seem to know about eve