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Research to detect changes in precipitation variables has become a topic of particular interest to understand modifications in water resources availability. The review is focused on the Italian territory, outlining the "state of the art" of changes in precipitation regime through a review of 54 published studies on observed rainfall trend analyses, in the period 1999-2018. The aim is to combine a large body of knowledge in a single review and to explain the main patterns of rainfall changes occurred in Italy over the last decades. The analysis focused on the Total Precipitation (TP) and the number of Wet Days (WDs) indices at the annual and seasonal scale. A weight factor is introduced to take into account the differences among studies in geographical area, time series length, and number of stations. The review is accompanied by the discussion of other rainfall related variables, that is, precipitation intensity, extreme rainfall events and meteorological droughts, which are useful to provide a broader picture of rainfall changes. Overall, there is an agreement about the tendency of a decrease in wet days on the entire Italy, with limited discrepancies in the various regions. A decrease in wet days is accompanied by a negative trend (although less evident) in total precipitation, especially in winter. Nevertheless, a univocal direction of trends (or lack of thereof) in annual total precipitation and mostly hydrological extreme events is difficult to achieve.
Understanding how the design hyetographs and floods will change in the future is essential for decision making in flood management plans. This study provides a methodology to quantify the expected changes in future hydraulic risks at the catchment scale in the city of Pamplona. It considers climate change projections supplied by 12 climate models, 7 return periods, 2 emission scenarios (representative concentration pathway RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5), and 3 time windows (2011–2040, 2041–2070, and 2070–2100). The Real-time Interactive Basin Simulator (RIBS) distributed hydrological model is used to simulate rainfall-runoff processes at the catchment scale. The results point to a decrease in design peak discharges for return periods smaller than 10 years and an increase for the 500- and 1000-year floods for both RCPs in the three time windows. The emission scenario RCP 8.5 usually provides the greatest increases in flood quantiles. The increase of design peak discharges is almost 10–30% higher in RCP 8.5 than in RCP 4.5. Change magnitudes for the most extreme events seem to be related to the greenhouse gas emission predictions in each RCP, as the greatest expected changes are found in 2040 for the RCP 4.5 and in 2100 for the RCP 8.5.
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