Millan Millan : he helped us understand rain

A pioneer in precipitation recycling and the small water cycle

Millan Millan passed away this month. He was a meteorologist who helped us understand that the degrading of our landscapes can lead to a decrease in precipitation recycling and the small water cycle, and to the subsequent loss of rain.

I can still hear the pioneering spirit and boldness of his personality, as his deep, gruff voice expounded on climate topics to me.

Millan graduated from University of Toronto in 1972 with a degree in atmospheric physics, then started working for the National Meteorology Center of Canada studying contaminant dispersion in the atmosphere. In 1991 he became the director of the Center of Environmental Studies of the Mediterranean.

I wrote about his exploits in my article “The quest to understand the origin of rain. Part II” :

“The Spanish were concerned. Spain was losing its rain. A member of the European commission asked the meteorologist Millan Millan, who already had been collecting a lot of meteorological data about the area, to investigate.

He found that deforestration, degradation and the paving over of the land were the culprits. Grasslands have less evapotranspiration that forests. Paved land has less evapotranspiration than grasslands. There was no longer enough evapotranpiration to add to the moisture blowing in from the ocean, to push the humidity over the saturation point. In order for rain to form, the air needed water contributions from both ocean and land, but the land contribution had been going down for decades.

A US forest service person, listening to Millan talk when he came to San Diego, said Millan’s results suggested that California, which had a similar Mediterranean climate to Spain, would experience similar troubles. The person guessed that in 20 odd years, California would dry out and start experiencing fires. A prediction, that years later, would unfortunately come true.

Millan Millan also found that the lack of rain in Spain, could lead to floods in the rest of Europe. Weather data collected showed that when moisture was unable to rain out, it would recirculate, along with pollutants, to form atmospheric layers, accumulating large amounts of water, hanging out above the coastal edge. All that moisture would then get blown over Europe and seed huge torrential rains. Land degradation can thus lead to the loss of smaller rains, while also creating larger rains. A result which points towards land restoration as a way to build a buffer against climate extremes.

“Water begets water, soil is the womb, vegetation is the midwife” Millan eloquently professes. The water stored in the soil, released by vegetation, is needed to create the waters of rain. He named the two causes of climate change the ‘two-legs of climate change’ - greenhouse emissions and land-use change. Millan continues to work to bring governmental and public attention to the leg of land-use change.”

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Two years ago, Judith Schwartz , author of “Water in Plain Sight” introduced me to Millan Millan, thank you Judith, and as a result I excitedly interviewed him. You can see/listen to the interview here . This interview helped launch me on the path of recording more podcasts for the Climate Water Project….. Judith Schwartz’s book “Reindeer Chronicles” has a chapter on Millan Millan.

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Rob Lewis wrote a lovely tribute to Millan Millan. Rob commented “I'm convinced he could see atmosphere and climate in ways few humans ever have, due to his life story and the work he did, not only studying local atmospheres, but designing one of the key instruments for that work, and calibrating it in the field to accord with the particularities of landscapes. During various monitoring "campaigns," which involved instrumented aircraft, weather balloons, and all kinds of field work, they would also rent the highest room in town, with windows all around, so they could keep constant visual awareness of the how the air moved. Like a biologist who spends their life understanding a single animal, he knew the meteorology in that region.”

Rob Lewis also penned a wonderful set of essays about Millan’s work.

Koen van Seijen recorded a podcast interview with Millan for his “Investing in regenerative agriculture” podcast. This was one of a series of podcasts on water.

Muse Ecology also has a podcast interview with Millan, and is where I first listened to Millan Millan.

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For those of you who might enjoy reading something slightly more technical about his work, here is the abstract of his paper, which showed how land degradation, can lead to the loss of rain in Spain, and also the increase of large storm and floods elsewhere in Europe:

“results indicate that the precipitation regime in this Mediterranean region is very sensitive to variations in surface air mass temperature and moisture. Land-use perturbations that accumulated over historical time and greatly accelerated in the last 30 yr may have induced changes from an open, monsoon-type regime with frequent summer storms over the mountains inland to one dominated by closed vertical recirculations where feedback mechanisms favor the loss of storms over the coastal mountains and additional heating of the sea surface temperature during summer. This, in turn, favors Mediterranean cyclogenesis and torrential rains in autumn–winter. Because these intense rains and floods can occur anywhere in the basin, perturbations to the hydrological cycle in any part of the basin can propagate to the whole basin and adjacent regions. Furthermore, present levels of air pollutants can produce greenhouse heating, amplifying the perturbations and pushing the system over critical threshold levels.” from his paper “Climatic Feedbacks and Desertification: The Mediterranean Model”

Rest in Peace Millan.

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