Within the framework of the project, and in particular within Spoke 5, the developed products contribute to the construction of an integrated data and methodological framework for the analysis of geo-hydrological processes and natural hazards at the national scale. The overall objective is to provide quantitative, updatable and interoperable tools to support modelling, forecasting and territorial planning within a multi-hazard and environmental digital twin perspective.
Within this context, two complementary products are developed.
The first is HR-DTM-5m Italy, a high-resolution (5 m) Digital Terrain Model covering the entire national territory, obtained through a structured and reproducible procedure for the integration of heterogeneous elevation datasets. The product is not only a dataset, but also a computational pipeline designed for HPC environments, enabling incremental updates as new data become available. The DTM represents a fundamental infrastructure for the description of terrain morphology, from which key variables for landslide analysis, sediment transport and hydrological dynamics are derived, and it also provides the topographic basis for territorial digital twin applications.
The second product is RAIN-EX Italy, a system for the climatological characterisation of extreme rainfall at the national scale. Through a reproducible computational procedure based on hourly rainfall time series, the system generates statistical rainfall functions and climatological maps associated with non-exceedance probabilities and return periods for multiple durations. The product is dynamic and updatable, providing a consistent quantitative representation of extreme rainfall forcing, which is essential for the analysis of landslide and flood triggering processes, as well as for early warning applications and hydrological modelling.
The two products are strongly complementary: the DTM describes the morphological component of the system, while RAIN-EX characterises the meteorological forcing. Their integration enables the development of both physical and statistical models of geo-hydrological processes, improving the capacity for analysis, forecasting and decision support in the context of natural hazard management and sustainable territorial planning.
