Future rainfall scenarios for the assessment of water availability in Italy

Abstract

This research aims at understanding and analyzing the possible effect of climate change on the seasonal rainfall regime over Italy. First, rainfall patterns are identified by applying a clustering procedure based on the Self-Organizing Map, by adopting and comparing the results of different gridded datasets describing current climate (1981-2010). Second, for the identified clusters the impact of climate change in the near (2021-2050) and the far future (2051-2080) is assessed by employing an ensemble of bias-adjusted EUROCORDEX climate projections under the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5. The results of this study show that, for the considered models’ ensemble, a significant decrease in cumulative rainfall values should be expected in the future, reflecting in a decrease in monthly values across all the seasons.