Roberto Coscarelli, Tommaso Caloiero, Gerard van der Schrier, Enric Aguilar, Joan Ramon Coll, Francesco Fusto, Raffaele Niccoli, 2018, Assessing the Italian climate and the European perspective, 1° Congresso Nazionale AISAM, pp. 232–233, Bologna, 10-13/09/2018,
URL: http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/391349

The European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) aims to provide daily meteorological station-based data and their analyses for scientific research in and outside the climate sciences. An important contribution to this activity is the E-OBS, which is the gridded data set with daily maps of temperature, precipitation and pressure for Europe, based on ECA&D. The relatively poor data coverage in the Mediterranean region is one of the drawbacks of ECA&D and translates in a large uncertainty for the estimates of daily temperature and precipitation in the E-OBS. The main aim of one of the WPs included in the European Project INDECIS ("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") is to conduct Data Rescue (DARE) missions to increase the ECA&D station coverage in the Mediterranean basin, especially over Southern Italy and the Balkan peninsula. For a region of Southern Italy (Calabria), a collaboration started between the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and the Centro Regionale Funzionale Multirischi Sicurezza del Territorio (Arpacal) of the Regione Calabria which collects and upgrades the regional climatic database managed by the former Italian Hydrographic Service. In particular, the actual station network covers the whole region with about 150 rain gauges and about 100 temperature stations. Besides rainfall and temperature, other climatic variables (humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind velocity and direction, etc.) are also measured but in few stations. By means of the cited collaboration, the daily rainfall and temperature data from about 70 stations, with an observation period that can reach 90 years, were joint with the ECA&D database (an average of about 30,000 rescue daily data - about 82 years - per station). In this communication the latest changes in ECA&D station coverage and products are shown. These improvements to the station coverage allow for a meaningful comparison of the Italian climate with that of surrounding European countries. Finally, the latest developments in efforts to further improve the quality of the gridded data, in terms of preservation of extremes and internal consistency, are discussed. A new approach to gridding the pan-European E-OBS data is presented, along with a demonstration of some of the improvements. The authors welcome comments and suggestions by users and data providers alike.

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