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The climatic characteristics of extreme precipitations for short-term intervals in the watershed of Lake Maggiore

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Abstract

Alpine and Mediterranean areas are undergoing a profound change in the typology and distribution of rainfall. In particular, there has been an increase in consecutive non-rainy days, and an escalation of extreme rainy events. The climatic characteristic of extreme precipitations over short-term intervals is an object of study in the watershed of Lake Maggiore, the second largest freshwater basin in Italy (located in the north-west of the country) and an important resource for tourism, fishing and commercial flower growing. The historical extreme rainfall series with high-resolution from 5 to 45 min and above: 1, 2, 3, 6, 12 and 24 h collected at different gauges located at representative sites in the watershed of Lake Maggiore, have been computed to perform regional frequency analysis of annual maxima precipitation based on the L-moments approach, and to produce growth curves for different return-period rainfall events. Because of different rainfall-generating mechanisms in the watershed of Lake Maggiore such as elevation, no single parent distribution could be found for the entire study area. This paper concerns an investigation designed to give a first view of the temporal change and evolution of annual maxima precipitation, focusing particularly on both heavy and extreme events recorded at time intervals ranging from few minutes to 24 h and also to create and develop an extreme storm precipitation database, starting from historical sub-daily precipitation series distributed over the territory. There have been two-part changes in extreme rainfall events occurrence in the last 23 years from 1987 to 2009. Little change is observed in 720 min and 24-h precipitations, but the change seen in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, 60, 120, 180 and 360 min events is significant. In fact, during the 2000s, growth curves have flattened and annual maxima have decreased.

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Acknowledgments

This study was carried out as part of the Strategie di Adattamento al Cambiamento Climatico (STRADA) project, funded under the Cross-Border Cooperation Programme INTERREG 2007–2013 Italy–Switzerland. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions allowed us to improve the presentation of our results. We would like to thank Mrs. Sandra Spence for the careful language revision of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The National Research Council—Institute of Ecosystem Study, Largo Tonolli 50, 28922, Verbania, Italy

    Helmi Saidi, Marzia Ciampittiello & Claudia Dresti

  2. Department of Earth Science, Cagliari University, Via Trentino 51, 09126, Cagliari, Italy

    Giorgio Ghiglieri

  3. Desertification Research Group (NRD), Sassari University, Sassari, Italy

    Giorgio Ghiglieri

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  1. Helmi Saidi
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  2. Marzia Ciampittiello
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  3. Claudia Dresti
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  4. Giorgio Ghiglieri
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Correspondence to Helmi Saidi.

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Saidi, H., Ciampittiello, M., Dresti, C. et al. The climatic characteristics of extreme precipitations for short-term intervals in the watershed of Lake Maggiore. Theor Appl Climatol 113, 1–15 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-012-0768-x

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