Projects
Smart Monitoring of basins subject to high geohydrological risk
The R&D project SMoRI starts from two needs to be reconciled. The first, coming from the scientific community, concerns a best definition of integrated monitoring systems aimed at controlling the conditions of high geo-hydrological risk. The second need is to acquire by the industrial partners a specialized know-how on new technologies related to Cloud Computing and I.o.T. and on the environmental ...
RiST2, the research go on
The researches at high-elevation sites continues, thanks to the RiST2 project (co-financed by Fondazione CRT of Torino). The study area is the Bessanese glacial basin. The Alpine environment and in particular the cryosphere, is responding quickly and with great intensity to climate change. The air temperature increase observed in the Alps urge the scientific communities involved in natural instability studies to consider not only air ...
Mediterranean Services Chain Based On Climate Predictions
The project focuses on climate predictions from seasonal-to-decadal timescales for the Mediterranean region (here defined as the domain encompassing the Mediterranean basin and the surrounding areas), and their applications in different sectors. The IRPI contribution will cover this aspect of the project, with specific reference to the conditions and evolution of cryosphere resources (WP4, Task ...
Integrated approach for the development across Europe of user oriented climate indicators for GFCS high-priority sectors: agriculture, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, water and tourism
Climate change strongly impacts the whole European territory. Drought severely affects agriculture; precipitation extremes are associated with flooding, severe damage to properties and lives; temperature extremes can increase mortality; the seasonality and availability of snow affects water resources and winter tourism; wind speed or sunshine hours affect the production of renewable energy. These relations can be studied through the computation ...
STSE Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy – Irrigation
Irrigation is one of the greatest human intervention in the hydrological cycle. The knowledge of the distribution, the extent of irrigated areas and the amount of water used by irrigation is needed for different purposes: 1) modelling irrigation water requirements at the global scale, 2) assessing irrigated food production, 3) quantifying the impact of irrigation on climate, river discharge and groundwater depletion. Notwithstanding its ...
Accuracy of hydrological data for extreme events analysis and upgrade of Umbria Regional Hydrological Service’s platform
The improved understanding of the underlying physical processes of extreme events is closely linked to the development and verification of procedures to better control, analysis and validation of hydrological data for the description and visualization of meteorological events creating an operational "database of event" which enables to better identify under what conditions hazards ...
Radar remote sensing techniques for the detection and measurements of ground surface deformations
Space-borne radar interferometry or DInSAR (Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) is one of the latest techniques used for the detection and measurement of ground surface deformations caused by natural and / or man-made events. The DInSAR technique has been successfully used in the measurement of seismic deformations and of the effects of subsidence, unstable slopes and inflation of magma in volcanoes. The growth of space ...
Research and development of optical fiber sensors for geotechnical and environmental monitoring
Application of optical fibers is generally aimed at large bandwidth transmission. Few people know that the proposal of optical fibers as sensing elements is almost as old as their proposal as transmission media, and over the last two decades fibre optic sensor (FOS) technology has assumed a dominant role in several fields of application. As a matter of fact, FOSs offer many advantages with respect to legacy electronic and mechanic sensors. ...
Cooperative Internet-of-Data Rural/Alpine Community Environment
Environmental sensor monitoring is continuously developing, both in terms of quantity (i.e. measurement sites), and quality (i.e. technological innovation). Environmental monitoring is carried out by either public or private entities for their own specific purposes, such as scientific research, civil protection, support to industrial and agricultural activities, services for citizens, security, education and information.
The left Cenischia ...
Deep seated Gravitational Slope Deformation (DsGSD) analysis and criticalities assessment of the regional monitoring network of the landslides
The Aosta Valley region presents a landscape almost totally occupied by mountain. In this context, a number of meaningful landslides is present, which vary from rock falls to deep-seated gravitational slope deformation (DsGSD), passing for the complex landslides. The study of these phenomena, finalized to guarantee suitable standard of safety and to facilitate a compatible development, results a fundamental necessity for this ...
Qualitative and quantitative degradation risks of water resources and effects on human activities
The research topics involve the consideration of geological, geomorphological, hydrological, hydrogeological, and technology and the use of innovative methodologies to achieve the sustainability of the natural balance inherent inland waters, with a focus on groundwater and river water. Finally, we consider the effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle and anthropogenic modifications to emphasize the contribution of these modifications ...
Preserving the quality of the scientific information
Producing knowledge implies the responsibility to divulge it with quality, making it available for everyone. With the advent of the Internet the possibilities to retransmit knowledge have grown, but the danger is also grown of a deterioration of its quality, as the Nobel prize Gell-mann already denounced in the nineties. The project intends to propose solutions to this kind of problem, contributing to improve the expressive capacity of thesis ...
Flood forecasting and hydraulic risk
The project is focused on flood forecasting and hydraulic risk, i.e. the assessment of the effects of flooding in flood-prone areas also involving the vulnerability assessment of the hydraulic structures (dams, leaves, bridges, etc.).
The effects of flood events are not completely eliminated by structural measures, therefore it is necessary to develop complementary non-structural measures, such as real-time Flood Forecasting and Warning ...
E-TECH New technologies for support and prevention of emergencies
The management of natural hazards tends radically to distribute responsibilities at the local level, as the first civil protection actors. Prevention and preparedness are long-term goals, rooted in volunteer expertise, and awareness of local citizens, using solutions of "crowd-sourced mappers". The objective is designing mobile applications, sensors and dashboard for citizens and volunteers of civil protection, with pilot study cases selected ...
Kinematic of debris flows using Large Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV)
Hazard of alluvial fans
In international literature, it is now widely recognized that alluvial fans are areas of high geomorphic activity. Debris flows and flash floods occur episodically in these environments, and place many communities at high risk. Calabria (southern Italy) is a region where alluvial fans widely occur. In this region, the presence of mountain fronts/alluvial and/or coastal plain, or deep and narrow valleys debouching into larger valleys are key ...
Pilot Project “Mitigation of the desertification processes in Calabria, in areas with a very high vulnerability”
Calabria is part of the 27% of the Italian territory deemed at desertification risk from the Plan of the National Area with Puglia, Sicilia and Sardegna. This project had a realization in an area called Valle dell’Esaro, close to Crotone, that is an area with high desertification risk. In fact, this area for its soil, climate, morphology characteristics and for the agricultural procedures represents the best site to test a model of good ...
Identification and estimation of the parameters for assessing the risk of desertification
The Calabria region, because of its climatic, geomorphological and anthropic characteristics, is one of the regions most exposed to the risk of desertification in the Mediterranean basin. Methods already known in the literature and new approaches were applied at a basin scale on an area of the Ionian side, that, for rainfall and climatic characteristics, is one of the most exposed to this ...
Methodology for the estimation of environmental risk indicators, using satellite remote sensing techniques
EPSILON Italia, the leader of the partnership proposing the project, is a SME, located in Calabria, specializing in the delivery of advanced services for the protection and management of natural resources, with a high standard of quality and technological content. The SME is also actively involved in the development and implementation of new technologies and in R&D activities conducted both in their own and in partnership with universities ...
Dikes and Debris Flows Monitoring by Novel Optical Fiber Sensors
With more than 5 million people affected, more than 1000 killed, and with estimated total damages exceeding 4.5 billion Euros just in Europe and during the last decade, floods are among the most disruptive natural events threatening our Society. Due to increase in extreme weather events and rapid socio-economic developments in vulnerable locations, the risks connected to floods in general are growing rapidly, and the awareness of these risks ...
RiST project: Scientific and Technological research in the Bessanese glacial basin (Balme, NW Italian Alps)
The Alpine environment, and in particular the high-altitude one, is responding quickly and with great intensity to climate change, through evidences of geomorphological, hydrological and ecological type. Mountain glacier shrinkage and related outcropping of rock walls and debris, changes of the precipitation and temperature patterns, are some of the main terrestrial indicators of climatic ...
Sentinel for Geohazards regional monitoring and forecasting
SAFETY aims at providing Civil Protection Authorities with the capability of periodically evaluating and assessing the potential impact of geohazards (volcanic activity, landslides and subsidence) on urban areas. The project improves the effort to detect and map geohazards, assess their activity and evaluate their impact on built-up areas and infrastructures ...
Methodologies for the analysis of alluvial fans
Some areas mapped in the Piani di Assetto Idrogeologico (Watershed Management Plan) of Piave, Brenta-Bacchiglione and Livenza Rivers require specific studies aimed at assigning a degree of hazard. Among the warning areas, there are numerous alluvial fans. The Soil Conservation Division of Veneto Region, in charge of the inquiry, identified the need to find an objective method for assessing the hazard of such ...
STSE Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy for the Mediterranean
Monitoring the water cycle from satellite observations is one of the major goals of the EO community and closing the water budget has been a long-standing objective of international programs. After years of hard work, calibrating satellite data, improving inversion techniques, and facilitating the coherency of retrievals, it is admitted that the water cycle budget can now be ...
SMOS+RAINFALL
Quantitative information about precipitation is one vital input to meteorologists, hydrologic scientists, water resources managers, and environmental legislators. Yet, accurate measurement of precipitation over the relevant space and time scales remains a challenge. Soil moisture can be seen as the trace of the precipitation and, consequently, can be useful for providing a way to estimate rainfall accumulation or at least a new constrain to ...
H-SAF AS: Integration of PR-OBS-5 and SM-OBS-1 products through SM2RAIN algorithm for improving rainfall estimate
State-of-the-art satellite rainfall products are often the only way for measuring rainfall in remote areas of the world. However, these products may fail in properly reproducing the amount of precipitation reaching the ground, which is needed for hydrological applications. The integration of satellite soil moisture products is expected to significantly improve rainfall ...
37 YEARS OF SOIL MOISUTRE DERIVED RAINFALL: application of SM2RAIN to the CCI soil moisture product, algorithm improvement and product validation
Recently, IRPI-CNR has developed an innovative approach for estimating rainfall from satellite soil moisture data, named SM2RAIN. The ESA funded project “Climate Change Initiative - Soil Moisture“ (CCI-SM) offers a valuable opportunity for testing SM2RAIN algorithm to a continuous, homogenous, long-term (>30 years) soil moisture time series. Indeed, SM2RAIN has the chance to be tested not only for rainfall estimation but also as a ...
Use of SMAP soil moisture products for operational flood forecasting: data assimilation and antecedent wetness conditions assessment
Siccità E Cambiamenti cLImatici
SECLI Project is aimed to assess the combined effects of processes related to natural and anthropogenic climate change on water resources, both surface and groundwater, in the Umbrian territory, identifying the possible consequences of such effects on drinking water policy, and on how these may affect the existing system of withdrawals and ...
Dynamic flooding scenarios
The project activities were carried out in two phases:
"dynamic scenarios of flood risk" identification through hydrologic-hydraulic modeling addressed to Civil Protection activities (2009-2011);
operational implementation of developed dynamic scenarios of flood risk and results dissemination trough web-GIS technologies, also within the context of Floods Directive 2007/60 /EC (2012-203); flood forecasting models implementation; ...
Flooding-prone areas delineation
Analysis, control and hydro-meteorological data processing – Rating curve estimate
The activities of the project concerns the analysis and processing of hydro-meteorological data collected by the monitoring network of the Umbria Region for the period 1994-2014. In particular, the study regards the rainfall, temperature and water level time series. In addition, the discharge series corresponding to observed water levels are estimated for at hydrometric station through the rating curve estimated on the basis of flow velocity ...
Flooding-prone areas delineation for hydraulic risk assessment for river reaches of the secondary hydrographic network in Tiber river basin
Integration of hydrometric measurements for river discharge monitoring and channel roughness coefficients assessment
River discharge monitoring is fundamental for the study of the hydraulic regime of river flow and for the validation and calibration of rainfall-runoff models. The assessment of channel roughness coefficients associated with the measured discharges is fundamental for the calibration of flood routing models that can be used to address civil protection activities in real time. Unfortunately, the number of river flow monitoring stations in the ...
Experimental Hydrological Database for Apennine Basins
The main activities of the project, developed in the context of the program Nextdata funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), are:
collection, organization and analysis of the available hydro-meteorological and climate data for the characterization of the meteo-climate evolution in Apennine mountain areas;
extensive experimental campaigns for soil moisture monitoring in hillslope portions and ...
EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management
The H-SAF generates and archives high-quality data sets and products for operational hydrological applications starting from the acquisition and processing of data from Earth observation satellites in geostationary and polar orbits operated both by EUMETSAT and other satellite organization. The retrieval of products uses data from microwave and infrared instruments and aims at reaching the best possible accuracy compatible with satellite ...