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1
Test Bed Leaders
- Jutta Thielen (Joint
Research Centre, European Commission)
- Stefano Tibaldi (ARPA, Bologna)
2
Test Bed Description
The Po river basin is
situated in Northern Italy and covers
an area of ca. 73,000 km2.
The Po River is the largest Italian river and 15 million people live
within its
reach (population densities up to 1500 inhabitants/km2). The
Po
basin includes several Italian regions: Piemonte, Lombardia,
Valle d'Aosta, Emilia Romagna,
Liguria, Trento
and small parts of Veneto.
It's main flow direction is west to east crossing whole Northern Italy
and
flowing into the Adriatic Sea. It has
a total
length of 650 km stretching from its headwaters, at 2000 m of
elevation, in the
south-west of the Piemonte region, close to France,
through all of Northern Italy passing the city of Torino,
coming close to Alessandria, Pavia,
Piacenza, Cremona
and Ferrara to the Adriatic
Sea. The Po has 141 tributaries, the biggest are Tanaro,
Ticino,
Sesia, Adda, Oglio and Dora Baltea and the surface water use in the
region
exceeds 25 billion m3/a. In the alpine part of the catchment
there
are three big lakes : Lago Maggiore, Lago di Como and Lago di Garda.
Forecasting
space/time scales of interest: medium-range
weather and flood forecasting up to 10-15 days
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Key Scientific Questions
- removing
bias
from meteorological forecasting data
- medium
range
probabilistic flood forecasting
- usefulness of
meteorological ensemble approach for QPF in improving flood forecasting
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Key
Objectives of the Research Project
Test simplistic
routines for bias removal
in an area such as Northern Italy that is dominated by important
orography (Alps) and for which the
weather forecasting models have
problems to produce reliable quantitative rainfall forecasts. The test
bed
leaders would like to test bias removal routines proposed for Bangladesh
for this region. The
method will be applied for both the deterministic and the probabilistic
weather
forecasts.
Methods for
flood
forecasting based on
threshold exceedances are being developed by the JRC within the
framework of
the European Flood Alert System and could be tested for the Po
also by other researchers. Availability of quasi-real time ensemble
high-resolution limited-area model quantitative precipitation forecasts
in the
Po Valley and alpine region will be exploited to test their usefulness
in
improving reliability of flood forecasting models and techniques.
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Data Resources
- GIS
information
on the catchment including DEM (1km), land use (1km) , soil data
(1:1M), river
network (1km, 5km)
- Discharge
data at
selected stations for a time period from 1995-present
- Ca.
10 x 3 discharge stations (with rating
curves) for the 10 major tributaries to the Po River
- 4-6
discharge
stations (with rating curves) for the main Po River
- ensemble
Limited-area model forecasts (QPF) from 2003-present
- rainfall,
evaporation and temperature on gridded fields (JRC MARS) from
1995-present
- rainfall and
temperature point data (ARPA) from 1995-present :
- time resolution daily
ca. 1000 stations
- time resolution hourly
ca. 500 stations
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