Antonio Parodi

CIMA Research Foundation

Citation: Esbrí, L.; Rigo, T.; Llasat, M.C.; Biondi, R.; Federico, S.; Gluchshenko, O.; Kerschbaum, M.; Lagasio, M.; Mazzarella, V.; Milelli, M.; et al. Application of Severe Weather Nowcasting to Case Studies in Air Traffic Management. Abstract: Effective and time-efficient aircraft assistance and guidance in severe weather environments remains a...

This work presents an innovative method of estimating the impact of lifestyle changes on greenhouse gases and air pollutants emissions based on a multi-modeling approach developed within the I-CHANGE H2020 project (2021-2025) http://ichange-project.eu . The ultimate goal of this project is to raise awareness on environmental and climate issues with...

I-CHANGE main objective is to raise awareness on the impacts of climate change and related natural hazards, through direct collection of environmental and socio-economic data with novel and user-friendly tools (sensors, monitoring devices, simplified models, data resources) The promotion of a co-designed learning approach will improve citizen knowl...

Citation: Temme, M.-M.; Gluchshenko, O.; Nöhren, L.; Kleinert, M.; Ohneiser, O.; Muth, K.; Ehr, H.; Groß, N.; Temme, A.; Lagasio, M.; et al. Innovative Integration of Severe Weather Forecasts into an Extended Arrival Manager. Aerospace 2023, 10, 210. Abstract: In the H2020 project "Satellite-borne and INsitu Observations to Predict The Initiation o...

Because of the ongoing changing climate, extreme rainfall events’ frequency at the global scale is expected to increase, thus resulting in high social and economic impacts. A Meteo/Hydro/Hydraulic forecasting chain combining heterogeneous observational data sources is a crucial component for an Early Warning System and is a fundamental asset for Ci...

The growth of air transport demand expected over the next decades, along with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfalls and severe storms due to climate change, will pose a tough challenge for air traffic management systems, with implications for flight safety, delays and passengers. In this context,...

In EUROCONTROLS's recent summary report on Climate Changes Risks for European Aviation, several weather-related impacts were highlighted. There is a strong relation between highly impacting weather events and disruptions to the aviation network resulting in additional fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. In Europe, severe weather is responsible for...

Nowadays, predicting the exact location and timing of severe convective phenomena at small spatial and temporal scales is still a challenge. In this respect, the H2020 SESAR project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM" (SINOPTICA) aims to improve the forecast of severe weather events by using th...

Because of the ongoing climate change, the frequency of extreme rainfall events at the global scale is expected to increase, resulting in higher social and economic impacts. Thus, improving the forecast accuracy and the risk communication is a fundamental goal to limit social and economic damages. Both Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and radar-b...

One of the main challenges for meteorologists is to improve the prediction of severe weather events that develop on small spatial and temporal scales and that have important repercussions in air traffic management activities (ATM). In this regard, the H2020 project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection fo...

Aerosols play a crucial role in climate through different feedback mechanisms, affecting radiation, clouds, and air column stability. This study focuses on the altitude dependence of the cloud-mediated indirect effects of aerosols in the Great Alpine Region (GAR), an area characterized by high pollution levels from anthropic activities in the Po Va...

The LEXIS (Large-scale EXecution for Industry & Society) H2020 project is building an advanced engineering platform taking advantage of HPC, Cloud solutions and Big Data, leveraging existing HPC infrastructures. In the framework of the LEXIS project, CIMA Research Foundation is running a three nested domain WRF Model with European coverage and rada...

One of the challenges for meteorologists is to forecast severe weather events developing at small spatial and temporal scales. The H2020 SESAR project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM" (SINOPTICA) aims at improving the performances of the numerical weather prediction model to nowcast severe w...

The Mediterranean region is regarded as the meeting point between Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Due to favourable climatic conditions, many civilizations have flourished here. Approximately, about half a billion people live in the Mediterranean region, which provides a key passage for trading between Europe and Asia. Belonging to the middle l...

In this work, we describe the integration of Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) forecasts produced by CIMA Research Foundation within ITHACA Extreme Rainfall Detection System (ERDS) to increase the forecasting skills of the overall early warning system. The entire workflow is applied to the heavy rainfall event that affected the city of Palermo...

Traditional usage models of Supercomputing centres have been extended by High-Throughput Computing (HTC), High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and Cloud Computing. The complexity of current compute platforms calls for solutions to simplify usage and conveniently orchestrate computing tasks. These enable also non-expert users to efficiently execut...

Aerosols play a crucial role in climate through different feedback mechanisms, affecting radiation, clouds and air column stability. This study focuses on the altitude-dependence of the cloud mediated indirect effects of aerosols in the Great Alpine Region (GAR), an area characterised by high pollution levels from anthropic activities in the Po Val...

In the framework of the SINOPTICA project (EU H2020 SESAR, 2020 – 2022), different meteorological forecasting techniques are being tested to better nowcast severe weather events affecting Air Traffic Management (ATM) operations. Short-range severe weather forecasts with very high spatial resolution will be obtained starting from radar images, throu...

In the framework of LEXIS (Large-scale EXecution for Industry & Society) H2020 project, CIMA Research Foundation is running a 3 nested domain WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model with European coverage and weather radar data assimilation over Italy. Forecasts up to 48 hours characterized by a 7.5 km resolution are then processed by ITHACA E...

The knowledge of tropospheric water vapor distribution can significantly improve the accuracy of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. The present work proposes an automatic and fast procedure for generating reliable water vapor products from the synergic use of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery and Global Navigation Satellite...

Numerical models are operationally used for weather forecasting activities to reduce the risks of several hydro-meteorological disasters. The overarching goal of this work is to evaluate the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model predictive capabilities over the Italian national territory in the year 2018, in two specific cloud resolving conf...

High‐resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) simulations of heavy rainfall events are known to be strongly sensitive to the choice of the sub‐grid scale parameterization schemes. In the African continent, studies on such a choice at the convective‐resolving scales are not numerous. By exploiting a state‐of‐theart NWP model, the Weather Resear...

High-Performance Big Data Analytics (HPDA) applications are characterized by huge volumes of distributed and heterogeneous data that require efficient computation for knowledge extraction and decision making. Designers are moving towards a tight integration of computing systems combining HPC, Cloud, and IoT solutions with artificial intelligence (A...

LEXIS (Large-scale EXecution for Industry and Society) H2020 project is currently developing an advanced system for Big Data analysis that takes advantage of interacting large-scale geographically-distributed HPC infrastructure and cloud services. More specifically, LEXIS Weather and Climate Large-Scale Pilot workflows ingest data coming from diffe...

The LEXIS Weather and Climate Large-scale Pilot will deliver a system for prediction of water-food-energy nexus phenomena and their associated socio-economic impacts. The system will be based on multiple model layers chained together, namely global weather and climate models, high-resolution regional weather models, domain-specific application mode...

Between the 4 th and the 6 th of November 1994, Piedmont and the western part of Liguria (two regions in northwestern Italy) were hit by heavy rainfalls that caused the flooding of the Po, the Tanaro rivers and several of their tributaries, causing 70 victims and the displacement of over 2000 people. At the time of the event, no early warning syste...

Along the Mediterranean coastlines, intense and localized rainfall events are responsible for numerous casualties and several million euros of damage every year. Numerical forecasts of such events are rarely skillful, because they lack information in their initial and boundary conditions at the relevant spatio-temporal scales, namely O(km) and O(h)...

Atmospheric Phase Screens (APSs) derived from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) observations contain the difference between the tropospheric water vapor induced delay of two acquisition epochs, i.e. the slave and the master (or reference) epochs. Using estimates of the atmospheric state coming from independent sources, for example nu...

This special issue is dedicated to the geo-hydrological severe events that frequently hit the central Mediterranean Area, and particularly the coastlines and hinterland of western Italy and southern France, including Sardinia and Corse. From the year 2000 many intense rain events have hit the area causing large damages and casualties: precipitation...

On 14 August 2018, Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed to the ground that was 40 m below. This tragedy killed 43 people. Preliminary investigations indicated poor design, questionable building practices, and insufficient maintenance - or a combination of these factors - as a possible cause of the collapse. However, around the collapse time, a...

Downbursts are very disruptive weather events that can produce large amounts of damage. The most studied downbursts are those occurring in the United States and continental Europe, but they can happen globally. This work is an observational and modelling analysis of a major downburst event that occurred on 14 October 2016 over eastern Liguria (Ital...

In this paper has been presented an analyses of different scheduling techniques on AWS ParallelCluster, an Amazon Web Services supported, open source cluster management tool for the deployment and management of High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud.

High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures (also referred to as supercomputing infrastructures) are at the basis of modern scientific discoveries, and allow engineers to greatly optimize their designs. The large amount of data (Big-Data) to be treated during simulations is pushing HPC managers to introduce more heterogeneity in their architec...

Every summer, wildfires affect thousands of steep watersheds in Italy, causing the partial or complete destruction of vegetation, and changes in soil hydraulic properties. Such effects alter the hydrologic response of watersheds, increasing post-fire debris and sediment-laden flow hazard. This study characterizes the most relevant predisposing and...

Downbursts are very disruptive weather events that can produce large amounts of damage. The most studied downbursts are those occurring in the United States and continental Europe, but they can happen globally. This work is an observational and modelling analysis of a major downburst event that occurred on 14 October 2016 over eastern Liguria (Ital...

Abstract. On 14 August 2018, Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed sending vehicles and tons of rubble to the ground about 40 m below and killing 43 people. Preliminary investigations indicated poor design, questionable building practices and insufficient maintenance or a combination of these factors as a possible cause of collapse. However, at...

The Mediterranean region is frequently struck by severe rainfall events causing numerous casualties and several million euros of damages every year. Thus, improving the forecast accuracy is a fundamental goal to limit social and economic damages. Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models are currently able to produce forecasts at the km scale grid...

This paper presents the first experimental results of a study on the ingestion in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, of Sentinel satellites and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) derived products. The experiments concern a flash-floodevent occurred in Tuscany (Central Italy) in September 2017. The rationale is that numerical...

Goal of the project was to investigate whether the assimilation of high resolution Earth Observation variables improve the forecast of heavy rain events. Several experiments were conducted assimilating soil moisture, surface wind, sea surface temperature, land surface temperature and zenith total delay. The assimilation of wind and water vapor cont...

This work assesses the predictive capability of a hydro-meteorological forecasting framework composed by a km-scale cloud resolving NWP model (WRF), including a 6-hour cycling 3DVAR assimilation of radar reflectivity and conventional weather stations data, a rainfall downscaling model (rainfall filtered autoregressive model, RainFARM) and a fully d...

The typical complex orography of the Mediterranean coastal areas support the formation, of the so called back-building Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCS) producing torrential rainfall often resulting into flash floods. As these events are usually very small-scaled and localized, they are hardly predictable from a hydro-meteorological standpoint, fr...

In recent years, continuous improvements have been made in weather forecasting and flood prediction with great benefit from Early Warning Systems (EWSs). Despite the continuous quest for innovation from the scientific and user communities, EWSs remain based mostly on hazard forecast, and the information on possible consequences and potential impact...

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is a numerical weather prediction system commonly used for atmospheric research and operational forecasting. Given the great amount of computing resources needed by this model, a HPC or cloud computing infrastructure is needed. In this paper, high resolution simulations (1 km) with data assimilation...

The importance of the upper ocean thermal vertical structure (mixed-layer depth and stratification) in the control of the precipitation during a heavy-rain-producing mesoscale convective system is investigated by means of numerical simulations. In particular, the fully compressible, nonhydrostatic Euler equations for the atmosphere and the hydrosta...

The importance of the upper ocean thermal vertical structure (mixed layer depth and stratification) in the control of the precipitation during a heavy-rain-producing mesoscale convective system is investigated by means of numerical simulations. In particular, the fully compressible, non-hydrostatic Boussinesq equations for the atmosphere and the hy...

The characterization of the hydro-meteorological extremes, in terms of both rainfall and streamflow, and the estimation of long-term water balance indicators are essential issues for flood alert and water management services. In recent years, simulations carried out with meteorological models are becoming available at increasing spatial and tempora...

The STEAM (SaTellite Earth observation for Atmospheric Modelling) project, funded by the European Space Agency, aims at investigating new areas of synergy between high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and data from spaceborne remote sensing sensors. An example of synergy is the incorporation of high-resolution remote sensing dat...

The mechanisms controlling the influence of the sea surface temperature (SST) structure on the surface winds are studied by means of numerical simulations run with a non-hydrostatic fully compressible state-of-the-art numerical model in a realistic midlatitudes setup, leading to the 9 October 2014 Genoa heavy rainfall event. Starting from a simulat...

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a numerical weather prediction system designed for both atmospheric research and operational forecasting needs. WRF requires a large amount of CPU power which increases drastically if WRF is used to model a big geographical area with a high resolution. To satisfy the computational demand WRF requi...

The European Space Agency (ESA) STEAM (SaTellite Earth observation for Atmospheric Modelling) project aims at investigating new areas of synergy between high-resolution numerical atmosphere models and data from spaceborne remote sensing sensors, with focus on Copernicus Sentinels 1, 2 and 3 satellites. An example of synergy is the ingestion of surf...

The region near the Ligurian Sea in northwestern Italy occasionally experiences extreme rainfall events that can lead to catastrophic flooding. These events are often caused by back-building mesoscale convective systems whose occurrence peaks during the autumn. Rapid warming of the Mediterranean Sea in recent decades has raised concerns that the wa...

Characterizing the hydrometeorological extremes, both in terms of rainfall and streamflow, as well as the estimation of long term water balance indicators are essential issues for the flood alert and water management services which are in charged to provide environmental monitoring. In recent years simulations carried out with meteorological models...

The cumulus parameterization is widely recognised as a crucial factor in tropical meteorology: this paper intends to shed further light on the effects of convection parameterization on tropical cyclones numerical predictions in the “grey-zone” (10-1 km grid spacing). Ten experiments are devised by combining five different convection treatments over...