,,,,,- Politecnico di Torino, Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Torino, Italy (alberto.viglione@polito.it)
As climate change intensifies, shifts in temperature and precipitation extremes raise concerns about increasing river flood risks. Understanding and quantifying how climate change influences floods is relevant from both theoretical and practical perspectives. From a research standpoint, although flood trend detection has been widely investigated, attributing observed changes to specific drivers remains challenging. From a practical perspective, reliable methods are needed to incorporate evolving climate conditions into flood predictions—particularly in ungauged basins—since traditional flood frequency analysis assumes stationarity.
In this work, we present research conducted at Politecnico di Torino addressing these issues. The objectives are to investigate the relationship between floods and climate extremes at both local and large spatial scales, and to propose methods for linking changes in flood frequency curves to evolving precipitation and temperature patterns. The study area is the Great Alpine Region (GAR), including the Po River valley in Northern Italy. Both data-based and modelling approaches are employed.
The data-based approach relies on the derived flood frequency framework and estimates flood sensitivity to changes in precipitation extremes by linking flood frequency curves and Intensity–Duration–Frequency curves through quantile–quantile relationships at the local scale. The modelling approach is based on the application of a regionally distributed rainfall–runoff model forced by climate model outputs, allowing changes in flood event characteristics to be investigated at the regional scale.
This study is carried out within the Clim2FlEx project and the RETURN Extended Partnership and is funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MUR, PRIN project 2022AX3882) and the European Union NextGenerationEU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3 – D.D. 1243 2/8/2022, PE0000005 – Spoke VS1).
How to cite: Viglione, A., Lombardo, L., Cafiero, L., Basso, A., Mazzoglio, P., Ganora, D., Claps, P., and Laio, F.: Linking climate and rainfall extremes to flood changes: data-based and modelling approaches, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-19843, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-19843, 2026.
