Plinius Conference Abstracts
Vol. 17, Plinius17-84, 2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-plinius17-84
17th Plinius Conference on Mediterranean Risks
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

RESILIENCE Project - Extreme Storms in the Italian North-East: frequency, impacts and projected changes

Eleonora Dallan1, Marco Borga1, Francesco Marra2, Giorgia Fosser3, Mario Martina3, Marco Marani4, Carlo Gregoretti1, Emanuele Lingua1, Antonio Canale5, Massimiliano Massimiliano1, Martino Bernard1, Maximiliano Costa1, Luigi Cesarini3, Giorgio Dalmasso4, Maria Francesca Caruso4, Valentina Zanaga6, and Mattia Zaramella1
Eleonora Dallan et al.
  • 1University of Padua, Department of Land Environment Agriculture and Forestry, Legnaro, Italy (eleonora.dallan@unipd.it)
  • 2National Research Council of Italy - Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (CNR-ISAC), Bologna, Italy
  • 3University School for Advanced Studies - IUSS Pavia, Pavia, Italy
  • 4Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
  • 5Department of Statistical Sciences, Padova, Italy
  • 6Consorzio Universitario Rovigo - C.U.R. Rovigo, Italy

The RESILIENCE project aims at developing  an integrated methodology for assessing the impact of climatic variations and changes on the intense precipitation and wind regimes, and on the consequent triggering of flash floods, debris-flows and wind-related forest damages. A significant increase of short and intense precipitation is expected in the next future due to global warming, with consequent impacts on flash floods and hydro-geomorphic hazards such as shallow landslides and debris flows. Despite their societal importance, only few studies have explored potential climate change effects on these hydrological and hydro-geological processes. In fact, no accepted estimates of such changes to be used in engineering practice or environmental management planning exist so far, nationally or regionally.

The RESILIENCE project tries to address this specific knowledge gap. Two recent scientific advances are at the basis of the development of RESILIENCE. The first advance is the advent of high-resolution climate models, also called Convection-Permitting Climate Models (CPM), which improve the representation of both precipitation and wind field at the sub-daily scales compared to the standard coarser resolution Regional Climate Models. However, due to their computational costs, simulations are currently available for only short (typically ten years) time slices and few emission scenarios. These time series are too short to provide reliable statistics of extremes if analyzed using the classical extreme value methods. A second recent advance in the field of extreme value theory, the Metastatistical Extreme Value Distribution (MEVD), allows to overcome this limitation: it provides reliable extreme event probability estimates even from short time series, as in the case of CPM outputs, since it is based on all “ordinary events'' in the series instead of just yearly maxima or a few “peak-over-threshold” values per year as in the traditional methods.

Given this background, and focusing on the Veneto region in Italy as a study area, the specific objectives of RESILIENCE are 1) to quantify near (2041-2050) and far (2090-2099) future changes in precipitation and wind extremes probability at sub-daily temporal scales with respect to the baseline (1996-2005) using the MEVD approach  and high-resolution COSMO-CLM simulations, 2) to quantify the associated future impacts on flash floods, debris flows and forest damages, 3) to provide data and hazard models to support flood and forest risk management plans in the Italian North-East accounting for future climate changes.

RESILIENCE brings together an interdisciplinary group of scientists, from hydrologists, to climate modelers, to statisticians, to forest science experts, and is based on the interaction with three key Project Stakeholders. The project results will be communicated and disseminated to a wide audience of residents in the Veneto region and beyond, through collaborations with Museums, Academies and Local Authorities.

How to cite: Dallan, E., Borga, M., Marra, F., Fosser, G., Martina, M., Marani, M., Gregoretti, C., Lingua, E., Canale, A., Massimiliano, M., Bernard, M., Costa, M., Cesarini, L., Dalmasso, G., Caruso, M. F., Zanaga, V., and Zaramella, M.: RESILIENCE Project - Extreme Storms in the Italian North-East: frequency, impacts and projected changes, 17th Plinius Conference on Mediterranean Risks, Frascati, Rome, Italy, 18–21 Oct 2022, Plinius17-84, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-plinius17-84, 2022.