AR05 - IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Research Area

Descrizione attivitĂ  di ricerca

Understanding warming climate implications on the key components of the hydrological cycle is of crucial importance, especially for areas particularly subjected to climate changes and land use/cover modifications. HYCLIC LAB has realized several works focused on the study of the hydrological changes and of two of the most recurrent drivers for hydrological changes that are climate change and land use change. HYCLIC LAB has carried out regional trend analyses of rainfall characteristics and hydrological extremes over the last century (e.g. Arnone et al., 2013; Forestieri et al.,2018) and investigated the scaling relation between rainfall extremes and variables representative of the near surface humidity, such as the surface air temperature and dew point temperature (Pumo et al., 2019, Pumo and Noto, 2021). In Pumo et al. 2017 and Arnone et al., 2018, the coupled effect of climate change and urbanization has been explored adopting a modeling framework based on the combined use of three models: (1) an advanced weather generator (the AWE-GEN, Fatichi et al., 2011), an ad-hoc implemented land use change model, and a spatially-distributed hydrological model (tRIBS, Ivanov et al., 2004). In these works, we have investigated: (1) potential changes in the annual water balance components (i.e. rainfall, actual evapotranspiration and runoff), in the daily flow duration curve and the runoff components repartition at catchment scale; (2) potential alterations of runoff extremes, analyzing changes in the various runoff components, both at event scale and continuously, in the hourly annual peaks, and in the mean annual occurrence and interarrival time of peaks over threshold. HYCLIC LAB has also developed analytical approaches to study climate change effects on the hydrological regime of small non-perennial river basins (Pumo et al., 2016) and some ecohydrological frameworks to investigate the co-evolution of hydrological components under climate change scenarios and potential Modifications in Water Resources Availability (Liuzzo et al., 2015; Francipane et al., 2015; Viola et al., 2016), climate changes’ effects on vegetation water stress in Mediterranean areas (Pumo et al., 2010) and predictions on future olive yield in a Mediterranean orchard (Viola et al., 2014).