Spatial Patterns of European droughts under a moderate emission scenario

Meteorological drought is generally defined as a prolonged deficiency of precipitation and is considered one of the most relevant natural hazards as the related impacts can involve many different sectors. In this study, we investigated the spatial patterns of European droughts for the periods 1981-2010, 2041-2070, and 2071-2100, focusing on the projections under a moderate emissions scenario. To do that, we used the outputs of the KNMI-RACMO2 model, which belongs to the A1B family and whose spatial resolution is 0.25°x0.25°. By means of monthly precipitation and potential evapo-transpiration (PET), we computed the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) at12-month accumulation scale. Thereafter, we separately obtained drought frequency, duration, severity, and intensity for the whole of Europe, excluding Iceland. According to both indicators, the spatial drought patterns are projected to follow what recently characterized Europe: Southern Europe, who experienced many severe drought events in the last decades, is likely to be involved by longer, more frequent, severe, and intense droughts in the near future (2041-2070) and even more in the far future (2071-2100). This tendency is more evident using the SPEI, which also depends on temperature and consequently reflects the expected warming that will be highest for the Mediterranean area in Europe. On the other side, less severe and fewer drought events are likely to occur in Northern Europe. This tendency is more evident using the SPI, because the precipitation increase is projected to outbalance the temperature (and PET) rise in particular in Scandinavia. Regarding the mid-latitudes, the SPEI-based analyses point at more frequent drought events, while the SPI-based ones point at less frequent events in these regions.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen

Meteorological Droughts in Europe: Events and Impacts: Past Trends and Future Projections

Observational records from 1950 onwards and climate projections for the 21st century provide evidence that droughts are a recurrent climate feature in large parts of Europe, especially in the Mediterranean, but also in western, south-eastern and central Europe. Trends over the past 60 years show an increasing frequency, duration and intensity of droughts in these regions, while a negative trend has been observed in north-eastern Europe. With a changing climate, this tendency is likely to be reinforced during the 21st century, affecting a wide range of socioeconomic sectors. The report provides a detailed description of the characteristics of drought events (i.e. their frequency, duration, intensity, severity) across Europe, and their evolution over the period 1950 to 2012, as well as projections until the end of the 21st century. A pan-European database of meteorological drought events for the period 1950-2012 and of their related sectorial impacts was built and a framework developed that links drought severity to expected damages under present and future climate.JRC.H.7 - Climate Risk Managemen

Estimating local records for Northern and Central Italy from a sparse secular temperature network and from 1961–1990 climatologies

The paper presents monthly 30-arc-second-resolution Northern and Central Italy temperature climatologies and discusses the procedure we adopt to superimpose the information of temperature secular records onto these climatologies. The climatologies are obtained by means of a step-wise linear regression method which aims at determining the temperature dependence on geographical and morphological variables. Such a method is applied to a database of about 800 monthly 1961–1990 temperature normals. In the first regression (temperature vs. elevation) the recorded data are considered; the further regressions concern the residuals obtained after taking into account the effect of each variable, in order of importance. An estimated secular anomaly record can be obtained for each point of the climatology grid by means of a distance-weighted average of the temperature anomaly records of the stations surrounding the grid point

Towards estimates of future rainfall erosivity in Europe based on REDES and WorldClim datasets

The policy requests to develop trends in soil erosion changes can be responded developing modelling scenarios of the two most dynamic factors in soil erosion, i.e. rainfall erosivity and land cover change. The recently developed Rainfall Erosivity Database at European Scale (REDES) and a statistical approach used to spatially interpolate rainfall erosivity data have the potential to become useful knowledge to predict future rainfall erosivity based on climate scenarios. The use of a thorough statistical modelling approach (Gaussian Process Regression), with the selection of the most appropriate covariates (monthly precipitation, temperature datasets and bioclimatic layers), allowed to predict the rainfall erosivity based on climate change scenarios. The mean rainfall erosivity for the European Union and Switzerland is projected to be 857 MJ mm ha −1 h −1 yr −1 till 2050 showing a relative increase of 18% compared to baseline data (2010). The changes are heterogeneous in the European continent depending on the future projections of most erosive months (hot period: April–September). The output results report a pan-European projection of future rainfall erosivity taking into account the uncertainties of the climatic models

1961-90 HIGH RESOLUTION TEMPERATURE, PRECIPITATION, AND SOLAR RADIATION CLIMATOLOGIES FOR ITALY

This PhD thesis focuses on the construction of monthly 30-arc-second resolution temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation 1961-90 climatologies for Italy and on the superimposition of the information of the secular anomaly records to these climatologies. The minimum, mean, and maximum temperature climatologies are based on a quality-checked new 1961-90 dataset for Italy that includes 1,493 TM records and 1,138 TN-TX records; they have been obtained by means of a Multiple Linear Regression model, plus local and global improvements and a Geographical Inverse Distance Gaussian Weighting of the residuals. The final monthly average MAE is 0.65 \ub0C for TM, 0.91 \ub0C for TN, 0.81 \ub0C for TX. The precipitation climatologies are based on a quality-checked new 1961-90 dataset for Italy that includes more than 4,000 precipitation totals; they have been obtained by means of a PRISM model. The relative MAE for yearly total precipitation is approximately 10%. Further work is under development in order to improve both the database and the models. Examples of new reconstructed temperature and precipitation secular records for 1851-2010 are shown and the methodology used to obtain a secular record for each grid point is described. The solar radiation climatologies are obtained by means of a solar radiation model based on a quality-checked new dataset for Italy that includes more than 150 sunshine duration records. The solar radiation model is created on the basis of astronomical parameters, shading effects, albedo tables and turbidity Linke\u2019s factor: monthly 1961-90 grids for direct, diffuse, reflected, absorbed, and global radiation are obtained. The final monthly average relative MAE is 4.6%

Multi organ semantic segmentation in CT scans

LAUREA MAGISTRALENel contesto dell'analisi di immagini mediche, algoritmi automatici ad accurati che perfor- mano la segmentazione degli organi a rischio hanno il potenziale di migliorare la diagnosi di malattie e il planning dei trattamenti di radioterapia. In questo elaborato ci siamo concentrati sulle immagini CT Scan ottenute da pazienti in corso di trattamento e anno- tate dai medici. Abbiamo eseguito una serie di esperimenti usando Reti convoluzionali, analizzando anche la possibilità di trasferire features da modelli pre-allenati su altre basi di dati. Abbiamo paragonato anche due approcci nel contesto della segmentazione multi- organo: l'uso di metodi ensemble costituiti da varie reti binarie, e la creazione di una singola rete in grado di segmentare multipli organi.In the context of Medical image analysis, accurate automatic algorithms for the segmenta- tion of organs at risk have the potential of improving desease diagnosis and radiotherapy treatment planning. In this work we focus ourselves on CT Scan images obtained from patients under treatment and labeled by medics. We perform a series of experiments with CNNs analyzing also the transferability of features coming from models pretrained on other data sources. We compared also two approach in the context of multi-organ segmentation: the use of ensemble methods made out of multiple binary nets, and the creation of a single network for multi-organ segmentation

2016 User Workshop of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service – Summary Report

This report summarises the User Workshop of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) which was held on 15-16 March 2016 at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy. The workshop focused on the mapping component of EMS and aimed at reviewing the service after four years of operations and at addressing its future evolution. Key to the discussion was the users’ perspective on the service. The workshop was attended by all stakeholders involved in EMS Mapping, namely its users, the coordinating three EC Directorate Generals (JRC is the technical coordinator), service providers and stakeholders involved in data access (ESA, EEA). The discussion during the 1.5 days showed that overall users are satisfied with the service. However, a number of suggestions for improvements were raised which would render the service more usable and improve the integration of products in user‘s workflows. It also showed that while on some aspects users seem to agree, they diverged on others. Main priorities for the future evolution are fast(er) product delivery, dissemination of products through web services, access to the imagery used in the production, improvement of the product portfolio (more technical products, tailoring to specific risks), increasing awareness about the service and what it provides. The EC will use the results from this workshop as input to its work on the evolution of the service in years to come. The workshop agenda and presentations can be retrieved from the website: http://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/ems/user-workshop-copernicus-emergency-management-service-user-perspective-current-status-futureJRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Projections of indices of daily temperature and precipitation based on bias-adjusted CORDEX-Africa regional climate model simulations

AbstractWe present a dataset of daily, bias-adjusted temperature and precipitation projections for continental Africa based on a large ensemble of regional climate model simulations, which can be useful for climate change impact studies in several sectors. We provide guidance on the benefits and caveats of using the dataset by investigating the effect of bias-adjustment on impact-relevant indices (both their future absolute value and change). Extreme threshold-based temperature indices show large differences between original and bias-adjusted values at the end of the century due to the general underestimation of temperature in the present climate. These results indicate that when biases are accounted for, projected risks of extreme temperature-related hazards are higher than previously found, with possible consequences for the planning of adaptation measures. Bias-adjusted results for precipitation indices are usually consistent with the original results, with the median change preserved for most regions and indices. The interquartile and full range of the original model ensemble is usually well preserved by bias-adjustment, with the exception of maximum daily precipitation, whose range is usually greatly reduced by the bias-adjustment. This is due to the poor simulation and extremely large model range for this index over the reference period; when the bias is reduced, most models converge in projecting a similar change. Finally, we provide a methodology to select a small subset of simulations that preserves the overall uncertainty in the future projections of the large model ensemble. This result can be useful in practical applications when process-based impact models are too expensive to be run with the full ensemble of model simulations

Monthly Rainfall Erosivity: Conversion Factors for Different Time Resolutions and Regional Assessments

As a follow up and an advancement of the recently published Rainfall Erosivity Database at European Scale (REDES) and the respective mean annual R-factor map, the monthly aspect of rainfall erosivity has been added to REDES. Rainfall erosivity is crucial to be considered at a monthly resolution, for the optimization of land management (seasonal variation of vegetation cover and agricultural support practices) as well as natural hazard protection (landslides and flood prediction). We expanded REDES by 140 rainfall stations, thus covering areas where monthly R-factor values were missing (Slovakia, Poland) or former data density was not satisfactory (Austria, France, and Spain). The different time resolutions (from 5 to 60 min) of high temporal data require a conversion of monthly R-factor based on a pool of stations with available data at all time resolutions. Because the conversion factors show smaller monthly variability in winter (January: 1.54) than in summer (August: 2.13), applying conversion factors on a monthly basis is suggested. The estimated monthly conversion factors allow transferring the R-factor to the desired time resolution at a European scale. The June to September period contributes to 53% of the annual rainfall erosivity in Europe, with different spatial and temporal patterns depending on the region. The study also investigated the heterogeneous seasonal patterns in different regions of Europe: on average, the Northern and Central European countries exhibit the largest R-factor values in summer, while the Southern European countries do so from October to January. In almost all countries (excluding Ireland, United Kingdom and North France), the seasonal variability of rainfall erosivity is high. Very few areas (mainly located in Spain and France) show the largest from February to April. The average monthly erosivity density is very large in August (1.67) and July (1.63), while very small in January and February (0.37). This study addresses the need to develop monthly calibration factors for seasonal estimation of rainfall erosivity and presents the spatial patterns of monthly rainfall erosivity in European Union and Switzerland. Moreover, the study presents the regions and seasons under threat of rainfall erosivity.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen

Diverse soil carbon dynamics expressed at the molecular level

The stability and potential vulnerability of soil organic matter (SOM) to global change remains incompletely understood due to the complex processes involved in its formation and turnover. Here we combine compound-specific radiocarbon analysis with fraction-specific and bulk-level radiocarbon measurements in order to further elucidate controls on SOM dynamics in a temperate and sub-alpine forested ecosystem. Radiocarbon contents of individual organic compounds isolated from the same soil interval generally exhibit greater variation than those among corresponding operationally-defined fractions. Notably, markedly older ages of long-chain plant leaf wax lipids (n-alkanoic acids) imply that they reflect a highly stable carbon pool. Furthermore, marked 14C variations among shorter- and longer-chain n-alkanoic acid homologues suggest that they track different SOM pools. Extremes in SOM dynamics thus manifest themselves within a single compound class. This exploratory study highlights the potential of compound-specific radiocarbon analysis for understanding SOM dynamics in ecosystems potentially vulnerable to global change