High-Resolution Monthly Precipitation Fields (1913–2015) over a Complex Mountain Area Centred on the Forni Valley (Central Italian Alps)

Abstract

Mountain environments are extremely influenced by climate change but are also often affected by the lack of long and high-quality meteorological data, especially in glaciated areas, which limits the ability to investigate the acting processes at local scale. For this reason, we checked a method to reconstruct high-resolution spatial distribution and temporal evolution of precipitation. The study area is centred on the Forni Glacier area (Central Italian Alps), where an automatic weather station is present since 2005. We set up a model based on monthly homogenised precipitation series and we spatialised climatologies and anomalies on a 30-arc-secondresolution DEM, using Local Weighted Linear Regression (LWLR) and Regression Kriging (RK) of precipitation versus elevation, in order to test the most suitable approach for this complex terrain area. The comparison shows that LWLR has a better reconstruction ability for winter while RK slightly prevails during summer. The results of precipitation spatialisation were compared with station observations and with data collected at the weather station on Forni Glacier, which were not used to calibrate the model. A very good agreement between observed and modelled precipitation records was pointed out for most station sites. The agreement is lower, but encouraging, for Forni Glacier station data.

Observed snow depth trends in the European Alps 1971 to 2019

“…For this we employed a spatial interpolation approach, similar to the one used for temperature and precipitation records (see e.g. Brunetti et al, 2006;Crespi et al, 2018;Golzio et al, 2018). The approach is based on correlations between the series, and because snow strongly depends on elevation, we first performed a spatial analysis to identify which correlations can be expected depending on horizontal and vertical distances between stations.…”

A multi‐century meteo‐hydrological analysis for the Adda river basin (Central Alps). Part I: Gridded monthly precipitation (1800–2016) records

“…High-resolution datasets of monthly precipitation have been recently produced over the Alpine region, for example, by Efthymiadis et al (2006) for the period 1800-2003 at 10-min spatial resolution and by Masson and Frei (2016) for the period 1901-2008 at 5 km resolution, while Isotta et al (2014) provided a 1971-2008 daily dataset at 5 km grid spacing. High-resolution analyses of precipitation were also provided over smaller Alpine domains, such as by Brugnara et al (2012) and Golzio et al (2018) for the central European Alps, by Gyalistras (2003) for Switzerland and by Durand et al (2009) for the French Alps. Among the gridding methods which have been proposed so far, the so-called "anomaly method" is one of the most applied approaches (e.g., New et al, 2001;Mitchell and Jones, 2005).…”

High‐resolution monthly precipitation climatologies over Norway (1981–2010): Joining numerical model data sets and in situ observations

“…After removing gross data errors in both monthly and daily series, the gap-filling procedure described in Golzio et al (2018) was applied to daily records in order to maximize the number and length of monthly data series available for climatological purposes. Monthly precipitation series were computed again for each station from filled daily records and whenever daily data were still missing, the corresponding monthly total was not computed.…”