Aegean Seas, as well as in the areas close to Cyprus and to Atlas mountains. The RCMs tend to underestimate intense cyclone occurrences over the Mediterranean Sea and reproduce 24-40 % of these systems, as identified in the reanalysis. The use of grid nudging in one of the RCMs is shown to be beneficial, reproducing about 60 % of the intense cyclones and keeping a better track of the seasonal cycle of intense cyclogenesis. Finally, the most intense cyclones tend to be similarly reproduced in coupled and uncoupled model simulations, suggesting that modeling atmosphereocean coupled processes has only a weak impact on the climatology and intensity of Mediterranean cyclones.

We review, analyse, and discuss the recent evolution and the future sustainability of rice paddy fields in Italy-the largest European producer-using outcomes from available literature and new analysis of agricultural statistics from local authorities, landuse and surface temperature data from remote sensing, hydrological and climate data from observations, and numerical models. We show that Italy can be considered a good representative for rice cultivation in temperate regions that are not freshwater-limited. However, this situation is changing. We report strong evidence linking the largest European reduction of seasonal surface water that have gradually occurred since 2000 over the rice cultivation area of Northern Italy, to the change in paddy management from traditional continuous flooding to a less greenhousegases-emitting practice, that is, dry-seeding with postponed flooding. This change was accompanied by several improvements in agro-practices and crop varieties. Concurrently, regional climate rapidly shifted towards sunnier weather conditions that partly contributed to higher rice yields and stability, decoupling yields from interannual climate variability, but also reducing water availability. In Northern Italy, a complete shift of rice cultivation towards dry-seeding is not compatible with seasonal water availability, and a number of drawbacks, with respect to the traditional wet seeding, are also identified from literature review. Therefore, in the context of near-term climate change, sustainable rice cultivation in the middle latitudes seems achievable (without limiting production and/or increasing volatility) by balancing traditional and dry-seeding.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Here, we analyze future projections of cyclone activity in the Mediterranean region at the end of the twenty-first century based on an ensemble of state-of-the-art fully-coupled Regional Climate System Models (RCSMs) from the Med-CORDEX initiative under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. Despite some noticeable biases, all the RCSMs capture spatial patterns and cyclone activity key characteristics in the region and thus all of them can be considered as plausible representations of the future evolution of Mediterranean cyclones. In general, the RCSMs show at the end of the twenty-first century a decrease in the number and an overall weakening of cyclones moving across the Mediterranean. Five out of seven RCSMs simulate also a decrease of the mean size of the systems. Moreover, in agreement with what already observed in CMIP5 projections for the area, the models suggest an increase in the Central part of the Mediterranean region and a decrease in the South-eastern part of the region in the cyclone-related wind speed and precipitation rate. These rather two opposite tendencies observed in the precipitation should compensate and amplify, respectively, the effect of the overall reduction of the frequency of cyclones on the water budget over the Central and South-eastern part of the region. A pronounced inter-model spread among the RCSMs emerges for the projected changes in the cyclone adjusted deepening rate, seasonal cycle occurrence and associated precipitation and wind patterns over some areas of the basin such as Ionian Sea and Iberian Peninsula. The differences observed appear to be determined by the driving Global Circulation Model (GCM) and influenced by the RCSM physics and internal variability. These results point to the importance of (1) better characterizing the range of plausible futures by relying on ensembles of models that explore well the existing diversity of GCMs and RCSMs as well as the climate natural variability and (2) better understanding the driving mechanisms of the future evolution of Mediterranean cyclones properties.

[1] The radiation transfer within the forest canopy plays crucial role in energy balance and turbulent transfer processes. Objective of this study is to suggest a new relation for vertical profile of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) in case of horizontally uniform forest canopy. It is based on (i) the Lambert-Beer law relationship and (ii) new parameterization of leaf area density (LAD) profile. We have supposed that absorption coefficient μ varies with height and depends on LAD distribution. To check validity of the relation proposed, we have compared calculated values with the observations using data sets assimilated during Anglo-Brazilian Amazonian Climate Observation Study experiment at two observational sites located in Reserva Jaru and Reserva Ducke (Brazil) with different types of forest. Among all available measurements, 615 profiles observed between 08 and 18 local mean time for 72 days at 2 locations were selected. For comparison study, two more profiles based on constant-and variable-LAD approximation were introduced. Obtained results indicate that suggested relation: (i) well reproduces PAR profile within the forest in comparison with observations and (ii) shows better agreement with observations in comparison with two other profiles used in this study.

This study assesses the effectiveness of short-term numerical weather prediction (NWP) in predicting the accumulation of growing degree days (GDDs) and meteorological conditions for apple scab appearance. Apple scab is the most frequent and harmful apple disease caused by the fungus Venturia inaequalis. Using the 30 days of NWP weather forecast and observed data for March 2011, representative data sets based on 24, 48, 72 and 96 h forecasts were designed. The results obtained for four lowland locations in Serbia and one slightly hilly location in Austria indicate that, on a monthly basis, there is a relative deviation of up to 20% in the GDD predictions above 0 ∘ C and a 40% relative deviation in the GDD predictions above 5 ∘ C. In contrast to the slightly hilly location, the apple scab appearance predictions based on the NWP in lowland locations correspond well with the results obtained using observed meteorological data. This indicates that short-term NWP is potentially effective in predicting apple scab appearance and has a slight advantage in lowland regions.