Operational flood-forecasting in the Piemonte region – development and verification of a fully distributed physically-oriented hydrological model

Abstract

Abstract.A hydrological model for real time flood forecasting to Civil Protection services requires reliability and rapidity. At present, computational capabilities overcome the rapidity needs even when a fully distributed hydrological model is adopted for a large river catchment as the Upper Po river basin closed at Ponte Becca (nearly 40 000 km 2 ). This approach allows simulating the whole domain and obtaining the responses of large as well as of medium and little sized sub-catchments. The FEST-WB hydrological model (Mancini, 1990;Montaldo et al., 2007;Rabuffetti et al., 2008) is implemented. The calibration and verification activities are based on more than 100 flood events, occurred along the main tributaries of the Po river in the period 2000-2003. More than 300 meteorological stations are used to obtain the forcing fields, 10 cross sections with continuous and reliable discharge time series are used for calibration while verification is performed on about 40 monitored cross sections. Furthermore meteorological forecasting models are used to force the hydrological model with Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts (QPFs) for 36 h horizon in "operational setting" experiments. Particular care is devoted to understanding how QPF affects the accuracy of the Quantitative Discharge Forecasts (QDFs) and to assessing the QDF uncertainty impact on the warning system reliability. Results are presented either in terms of QDF and of warning issues highlighting the importance of an "operational based" verification approach.

Testing the use of reimbursement data to obtain damage curves in urbanised areas: the case of the Piedmont flood on October 2000

“…The river district displays a mixed Alpine‐Mediterranean climate (as in the whole Italian northern regions): on the Alps snowfalls are frequent from October to May, giving important snowmelts during springs; on the northern Alps, the precipitation regime reaches the maximum at the end of the summer and in autumn, with a second peak in the spring. On the Southern Alps and on the Apennines, rainfall can be heavy and prolonged in both autumn and spring (Rabuffetti and Barbero, ; Ratto et al ., ).…”

Feasibility Study of a DC Hybrid-Electric Catamaran for River Navigation

“…In the worst scenario, there could be a risk of loss of vessels. Extreme weather events are generally increasing in number and severity in the central-southern Europe zone [2], thus, measures must be taken to avoid damages and injuries, minimising economic losses, too [3,4]. For instance, a severe weather event dominated by high rainfall occurred in November 2016 [5] in the north-western regions of Italy, which caused extended damages in large areas of the Piedmont region, including river floodings in several countryside zones.…”

Recommendations for Improving Integration in National End-to-End Flood Forecasting Systems: An Overview of the FFIR (Flooding From Intense Rainfall) Programme

“…End-to-end forecasting has been around for some time and many meteorological or hydrological centres have some form of operational end-to-end flood forecast (e.g., [5,6]). The more sophisticated end-to-end forecasts go further down the chain, i.e., they include hydraulic components either through a look-up library of static flood maps (e.g., [7,8]) or by running hydraulic models (e.g., [4,9]). Thus the FFIR programme develops the end-to-end forecasts by improving stages in the forecasting chain and the overall integration of such systems, with a specific focus on small-scale intense rainfall events that lead to flooding in high-resolution models.…”