Attilio Castellarin

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering DICAM

The complexity of land transport infrastructures, their length and the heterogeneity of potential hazardous scenarios across large areas make flood hazard assessment a challenging task. We propose a parsimonious, rapid and operational procedure that enables large scale applications and, at the same time, a detailed evaluation of individual segments...

Robust Decision Making (RDM) is an established framework for decision making under deep uncertainty. RDM relies on the idea of scenario neutrality, namely that decision robustness is not affected by how scenarios are generated if these are uniformly distributed and span a sufficiently large range of future states of the world. Several authors have...

Recent literature shows several examples of simplified approaches that perform flood hazard (FH) assessment and mapping across large geographical areas on the basis of fast-computing geomorphic descriptors. These approaches may consider a single index (univariate) or use a set of indices simultaneously (multivariate). What is the potential and accu...

For about 24,000 river basins across Europe, we provide a continuous representation of the streamflow regime in terms of empirical flow–duration curves (FDCs), which are key signatures of the hydrological behaviour of a catchment and are widely used for supporting decisions on water resources management as well as for assessing hydrologic change. I...

Climate change and rapid expansion of urban areas are expected to increase pluvial flood hazard and risk in the near future, and particularly so in large developed areas and cities. Therefore, large-scale and high-resolution pluvial flood hazard mapping is required to identify hotspots where mitigation measures may be applied to reduce flood risk....

In this paper, two emerging strategies for the reduction of the computational time of 2D large-scale flood simulations are compared, with the aim of evaluating their strengths and limitations and of suggesting guidelines for their effective application. The analysis is based on two state-of-the-art raster flood models with different governing equat...

Recent literature shows several examples of simplified approaches that perform flood hazard (FH) assessment and mapping across large geographical areas on the basis of fast-computing geomorphic descriptors. These approaches may consider a single index (univariate) or use a set of indices simultaneously (multivariate). What is the potential and accu...

Extraordinary flood events occurred recently in northwest England, with several severe floods in Cumbria, Lancashire and the Manchester area in 2004, 2009 and 2015. These clustered extraordinary events have raised the question of whether any changes in the magnitude and frequency of river flows in the region can be detected. For this purpose, the a...

Residential assets, comprising buildings and household contents, are a major source of direct flood losses. Existing damage models are mostly deterministic and limited to particular countries or flood types. Here, we compile building-level losses from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands covering a wide range of fluvial and pluvial flood events. Util...

Spatial cross-correlation among flood sequences impacts the accuracy of regional predictors. Our study investigates this impact for two regionalization procedures, generalized least squares (GLS) regression and top-kriging (TK), which deal with cross-correlation in two fundamentally different ways and therefore might be associated with different ac...

Reliable hazard analysis is crucial in the flood risk management of river basins. For the floodplains of large, developed rivers, flood hazard analysis often needs to account for the complex hydrology of multiple tributaries and the potential failure of dikes. Estimating this hazard using deterministic methods ignores two major aspects of large-sca...

Study region: The present study focuses on Emilia-Romagna (northern Italy), a densely populated region affected in the last few years by several destructive flood events. Study focus: A rich and detailed regional dataset of annual maximum series (AMS) of sub-daily rainfall is considered with a threefold aim: to detect possible changes in (1) seaso...

A topographic index (flood descriptor) that combines the scaling of bankfull depth with morphology was shown to describe the tendency of an area to be flooded. However, this approach depends on the quality and availability of flood maps and assumes that outcomes can be directly extrapolated and downscaled. This work attempts to relax these problems...

Commercial assets comprise buildings, machinery and equipment, which are susceptible to floods. Existing damage models and exposure estimation methods for this sector have limited transferability between flood events. In this study we introduce two methodologies aiming at broader applicability: (1) disaggregation of economic statistics to obtain de...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process and to share th...

Commercial assets comprise buildings, machinery and equipment, which are susceptible to floods. Existing damage models and exposure estimation methods for this sector have limited transferability between flood events and therefore limited potential for pan-European applications. In this study we introduce two methodologies aiming at improving comme...

A topographic index, or flood descriptor, that combines the scaling of bankfull depth with morphology was shown to describe well the tendency of an area to be flooded. However, this approach depends on the quality and availability of flood maps and assumes that outcomes can be directly extrapolated and downscaled. This work attempts to relax these...

The increase in frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events caused by the changing climate (e.g., cloudbursts, rainstorms, heavy rainfall, hail, heavy snow), combined with the high population density and concentration of assets, makes urban areas particularly vulnerable to pluvial flooding. Hence, assessing their vulnerability under cur...

Different upper tail indicators exist to characterize heavy tail phenomena, but no comparative study has been carried out so far. We evaluate the shape parameter (GEV), obesity index, Gini index and upper tail ratio (UTR) against a novel benchmark of tail heaviness – the surprise factor. Sensitivity analyses to sample size and changes in scale-to-l...

The present study analyzes the spatial and temporal variability of the specific flood of record (SFOR) for a large dataset of more than 3400 catchments across Europe. We highlight that: (1) years of occurrence of SFOR values are mainly concentrated in the last thirty years (i.e. 1987-2016), especially in the area of Central Europe; (2) smaller catc...

Levee failures due to floods often cause considerable economic damage and life losses in inundated dike-protected areas, and significantly change flood hazard upstream and downstream the breach location during the event. We present a new extension for the LISFLOOD-FP hydrodynamic model which allows levee breaching along embankments in fully two-dim...

A detailed delineation of flood-prone areas over large regions represents a challenge that cannot be easily solved with today’s resources. The main limitations lie in algorithms and hardware, but also costs, scarcity and sparsity of data and our incomplete knowledge of how inundation events occur in different river floodplains. We showcase the impl...

This study evaluates and compares two-dimensional (2D) numerical models of different complexities by testing them on a floodplain inundation event that occurred on the Secchia River (Italy). We test 2D capabilities of LISFLOOD-FP and HEC-RAS (5.0.3), implemented using various grid sizes (25–100 m) based on 1-m DEM resolution. As expected, the best...

There is a growing interest in using radar rainfall data to evaluate the performance of urban drainage systems in near real time. This paper describes a study based on a large (55 km2) urban catchment in northern Italy. Different spatial resolutions of radar data have been compared and used as input to a numerical hydrological-hydraulic model of th...

Climate change has led to concerns about increasing river floods resulting from the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere¹. These concerns are reinforced by evidence of increasing economic losses associated with flooding in many parts of the world, including Europe². Any changes in river floods would have lasting implications for th...

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through on-line media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, p...

In caso di eventi alluvionali, i danni strutturali e/o le interruzioni di servizio delle infrastrutture lineari di trasporto (ad esempio ferrovie, autostrade, ecc.) sono responsabili di una parte considerevole delle perdite economiche totali, dirette e indirette, specialmente nei Paesi più sviluppati. Partendo da questa considerazione, la memoria,...

Extended abstract Economic losses and social consequences caused by hydrological extreme events in Europe have been steadily increasing over the last three decades, due to the combination of different factors. Climate change is often indicated as responsible for the intensification of extreme hydrological events, but several studies also highlight...

In case of flood events the damage and/or service disruption of linear infrastructures (e.g. railways, highways, etc.) is responsible for a considerable part of the total direct and indirect loss, especially in developed countries. Moving from this consideration, this study focuses on large networks of linear infrastructures (in particular, railway...

A detailed delineation of flood-prone areas over large regions represents a challenge that cannot be easily solved with today's resources. The main limitations lie in algorithms and hardware, but also costs, scarcity and sparsity of data and our incomplete knowledge of how inundation events occur in different river floodplains. We showcase the impl...

Flood risk management generally relies on economic assessments performed by using flood loss models of different complexity, ranging from simple univariable models to more complex multivariable models. The latter account for a large number of hazard, exposure and vulnerability factors, being potentially more robust when extensive input information...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share...

Flood susceptibility indicators that combine hydraulic scaling with morphological descriptors were shown to be well suited to map flood prone areas (Manfreda et al., 2015; Samela et al., 2017). However, the methodological workflow used (Degiorgis et al., 2012) strongly depends on the availability of reference flood studies to perform a linear binar...

Flood risk management generally relies on economic assessments performed using flood loss models of different complexity, ranging from simple univariable to more complex multivariable models. These latter accounts for a large number of hazard, exposure and vulnerability factors, being potentially more robust when extensive input information is avai...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share t...

Understanding in detail which areas are prone to riverine flooding over large scales remains a challenge, relating very much to data scarcity and sparsity, but also to our limited knowledge on how hazard in an atmosphere-catchment system operates and to the economic effort in setting up detailed models for complex river networks. This paper describ...

Our study develops and tests a geostatistical technique for locally enhancing macro-scale rainfall–runoff simulations on the basis of observed streamflow data that were not used in calibration. We consider Tyrol (Austria and Italy) and two different types of daily streamflow data: macro-scale rainfall–runoff simulations at 11 prediction nodes and o...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union-EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share t...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share t...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share t...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share t...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow‐up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process and to share th...

Flood loss models are one important source of uncertainty in flood risk assessments. Many countries experience sparseness or absence of comprehensive high-quality flood loss data, which is often rooted in a lack of protocols and reference procedures for compiling loss datasets after flood events. Such data are an important reference for developing...

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share...

Flow–duration curves (FDCs) are essential to support decisions on water resources management, and their regionalization is fundamental for the assessment of ungauged basins. In comparison with calibrated rainfall–runoff models, statistical methods provide data-driven estimates representing a useful benchmark. The objective of this work is the inter...

The present work summarizes the findings of the validation of an index-based estimation of riverine flood-prone areas at the European scale (i.e., 269 drainage basins). A pattern recognition technique is applied to a morphological descriptor for the classification of flood-prone areas and their simplified mapping over large-scales. The classificati...

Anthropogenic activities along streams and rivers may be of major concern for fluvial ecosystems, e.g. abstraction and impoundment of surface water resources may profoundly alter natural streamflow regimes. An established approach aimed at preserving the behavior and distribution of fluvial species relies on the definition of ecological flows (e-fl...

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite mission (SWOT), scheduled for launch in 2021, will deliver two-dimensional observations of water surface heights for lakes, rivers wider than 100 m and oceans. Even though the scientific literature has highlighted several fields of application for the expected products, detailed simulations of the SW...

Il presente studio prende in esame il Triveneto, vasta area geografica comprendente le Alpi Orientali italiane, ed ha tre obiettivi principali: (1) valutare l’influenza dei fattori climatici e di scala sul regime di frequenza delle piene; (2) verificare la possibile presenza di alterazioni del regime di frequenza dei massimi annuali di portata al c...

Current approaches for assessing large-scale flood risks contravene the fundamental principles of the flood risk system functioning because they largely ignore basic interactions and feedbacks between atmosphere, catchments, river-floodplain systems, and socioeconomic processes. As a consequence, risk analyses are uncertain and might be biased. How...

We investigate possible changes in flood hazard over a 77-km² area around the city of Ravenna. The subsidence rate in the area, naturally a few mm year⁻¹, increased dramatically after World War II because of groundwater and natural gas extraction, exceeding 110 mm year⁻¹ and resulting in cumulative drops larger than 1.5 m. The Montone–Ronco river s...

Our study develops and tests a geostatistical technique for locally enhancing macro-scale rainfall-runoff simulations on the basis of observed streamflow data that were not used in calibration. We consider Tyrol (Austria and Italy) and two different types of daily streamflow data: macro-scale rainfall-runoff simulations at 11 prediction nodes and o...

Simplified flood loss models are one important source of uncertainty in flood risk assessments. Many countries experience sparseness or absence of comprehensive high-quality flood loss data sets which is often rooted in a lack of protocols and reference procedures for compiling loss data sets after flood events. Such data are an important reference...

A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric...

The anthropogenic alteration of the natural flow regime of a river for hydropower production can significantly modify the processes and functions associated with fluvial ecosystems. In order to preserve the fluvial habitat downstream of dams and diversion structures, environmental flows are commonly defined. Such environmental flows are generally c...

Integrating large open data and emerging information and communication technologies in flood risk management may well represent a next crucial stage in supporting robust, evidence-based decision-making. Flood risk management policies, such as the EU Floods Directive, are increasingly demanding and challenging, and authorities and stakeholders are c...