Around the mid 1990s, the authors set up a broad-based research program with the aim of better understanding the evolution of Italian climate in the last 100/150 years. The program was developed both within European (UE IMPROVE and ALPCLIM projects) and National projects (National Research Council (CNR) project "Reconstruction of the Past Climate in the Mediterranean area"). At present it is in progress within the "Progetto Finalizzato CLIMAGRI", a project of the Italian "Ministero per le Politiche Agricole e Forestali". Moreover, in the next two years, further activities will be performed within the research program "Local climate variability in relation to global climatic change phenomena" funded by the Italian "Ministero per l'Istruzione, l'Universita' e la Ricerca" and by Genoa, Milan, Trieste, Turin and Udine Universities. The studies so far carried out have improved the availability and the quality of Italian data and have produced interesting information on the evolution of temperature, precipitation and some other parameters in the last 100/150 years. The paper summarises the main results obtained within the research program.
During the night between 9 and 10 September 2017, multiple flash floods associated to a heavy-precipitation event affected the town of Livorno, located in Tuscany, Italy. Accumulated precipitation exceeding 200 mm in two hours, associated with a return period higher than 200 years, caused all the largest streams of the Livorno municipality to flood several areas of the town. We used the limited-area Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, in a convection-permitting setup, to reconstruct the extreme event leading to the flash floods. We evaluated possible forecasting improvements emerging…
The measuring stations of a geophysical network are often spatially distributed in an inhomogeneous manner. The areal inhomogeneity can be well characterized by the fractal dimension D_H of the network, which is usually smaller than the euclidean dimension of the surface, this latter equal to 2. The resulting dimensional deficit, (2-D_H), is a measure of precipitating events which cannot be detected by the network. The aim of the present study is to estimate the fractal dimension of a rain-gauge network in Tuscany (Central Italy) and to relate its dimension to the dimensions of daily rainfall …
Precipitation extremes intensify in most regions in climate-model projections. Changes in vertical velocities contribute to the changes in intensity of precipitation extremes but remain poorly understood. Here, we find that mid-tropospheric vertical velocities in extratropical precipitation extremes strengthen overall in simulations of 21st-century climate change. For each extreme event, we solve the quasi-geostrophic omega equation to decompose this strengthening into different physical contributions. We first consider a dry decomposition in which latent heating is treated as an external forc…
We investigate the potential added value of running three limited-area ensemble systems (with the WRF, Meso-NH and MOLOCH models and a grid spacing of approximately 2.5 km) for two heavy-precipitation events in Italy. Such high-resolution ensembles include an explicit treatment of convective processes and dynamically downscale the ECMWF global data, which have a grid spacing of approximately 18 km. The predictions are verified against rain-gauge data and their accuracy is evaluated over that of the driving coarser-resolution ensemble system. Furthermore, we compare the simulation speed (define…
Quantitative assessment of climate change risk requires a method for constructing probabilistic time series of changes in physical climate parameters. Here, we develop two such methods, Surrogate/Model Mixed Ensemble (SMME) and Monte Carlo Pattern/Residual (MCPR), and apply them to construct joint probability density functions (PDFs) of temperature and precipitation change over the 21st century for every county in the United States. Both methods produce $likely$ (67% probability) temperature and precipitation projections consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's interpret…
Climate projection uncertainty can be partitioned into model uncertainty, scenario uncertainty and internal variability. Here, we investigate the different sources of uncertainty in the projected frequencies of daily maximum temperature and precipitation extremes, which are defined as events that exceed the 99.97th percentile. This is done globally using initial-condition large ensembles. For maximum temperature extremes, internal variability dominates in the next two decades. Around the middle of the 21st century model and scenario uncertainty become the dominant contribution in the tropics b…
In this study, we investigate how PCMDI/CMIP3 general circulation models (GCMs) represent the seasonal properties of the hydrological cycle in four major South and Southeast Asian river basins (Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong). First, we examine the skill of the GCMs by analysing their performance in simulating the 20th century climate (1961-2000 period) using historical forcing (20c3m experiment), and then we analyse the projected changes for the corresponding 21st and 22nd century climates under the SRESA1B scenario. The CMIP3 GCMs show a varying degree of skill in simulating the basic…
We review the skill of thirty coupled climate models participating in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 in terms of reproducing properties of the seasonal cycle of precipitation over the major river basins of South and Southeast Asia (Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong) for historical period (1961-2000). We also present projected changes by these models by end of century (2061-2100) under extreme scenario RCP8.5. First, we assess their ability to reproduce observed timings of the monsoon onset and the rate of rapid fractional accumulation (RFA slope) - a measure of seasonality within …
The mean North American and world climates have warmed significantly since the beginning of climatologically significant anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases in the 19th Century. It has been suggested that warming may increase the frequency or severity of droughts. We define and study the statistics of an aridity index that describes the precipitation forcing function of a drought, considering drought to be a season with low enough precipitation to be significant for agriculture. Our aridity index is a reciprocal function of the seasonal precipitation, which is more significant for agric…
Monthly streamflow records from a set of gauging stations, selected to form a reference hydrologic network, are analyzed together with precipitation and temperature data to establish whether the streamflows in the Guadalquivir River Basin have experienced changes during the last half of the XXth century that can be attributed to hydrological forcing. The observed streamflows in the reference network have undergone generalized and significant decreases both at seasonal and annual scales during the study period. Annual rainfall, though, did not experienced statistically significant changes. The …
An intercomparison of generative machine learning methods for downscaling precipitation at fine spatial scales
Earth Sciences New Zealand（新西兰地球科学）；School of Computer Science, University of Auckland（奥克兰大学计算机科学学院）；NVIDIA AI Technology Centre, NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达人工智能技术中心，英伟达公司）；ARC Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century & Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学21世纪天气卓越研究中心及气候变化研究中心）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO））；Laboratory for Turbulence Research in Aerospace and Combustion, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Monash University（莫纳什大学机械与航空航天工程系航空与燃烧湍流研究实验室）
Climate change is likely to pose enormous challenges for agriculture, water resources, infrastructure, and livelihood of millions of people living in South Asia. Here, we develop daily bias-corrected data of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperatures at 0.25° spatial resolution for South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka) and 18 river basins located in the Indian sub-continent. The bias-corrected dataset is developed using Empirical Quantile Mapping (EQM) for the historic (1951-2014) and projected (2015-2100) climate for the four scenarios (SSP126, SSP245, SS…
We present an intercomparison and verification analysis of 20 GCMs included in the 4th IPCC assessment report regarding their representation of the hydrological cycle on the Danube river basin for 1961-2000 and for the 2161-2200 SRESA1B scenario runs. The basin-scale properties of the hydrological cycle are computed by spatially integrating the precipitation, evaporation, and runoff fields using the Voronoi-Thiessen tessellation formalism. The span of the model simulated mean annual water balances is of the same order of magnitude of the observed Danube discharge of the Delta; the true value i…
This paper investigates the impacts of climate change on groundwater droughts making use of regional projections and standardized indices: the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and the Standardized Groundwater Index (SGI). The method adopted, using historical precipitation and temperature data and water levels collected in monitoring wells, first investigates the possible correlations between meteorological and groundwater indices at each well. Then, if there is a correlation, a linear regression analysis is used to model the…
Observed changes such as increasing global temperatures and the intensification of the global water cycle in the 20th century are also robust results of coupled general circulation models. In spite of this success model-to-model variability and biases that are small in first order climate responses however, have implications for climate predictability especially when multi-model means are used. We show that most climate simulations of 20th and 21st century A2 scenario performed with IPCC-AR4 models have deficiencies in simulating the global atmospheric moisture balance. Large biases of only a …
