Cintia Bertacchi Uvo

• Professor
• Professor at Finnish Environment Institute

Hydrological models are generally calibrated and validated using a suite of well-known statistical metrics, which sometimes lack clear connection and tailoring to the local users’ need and therefore limits the evaluation, especially in the case of global climate services. Therefore, in this study, two types of application-based evaluation metrics a...

In recent years, the analysis of abrupt and non-abrupt changes in precipitation has received much attention due to the importance of climate change-related issues (e.g., extreme climate events). In this study, we used a novel segmentation algorithm, DBEST (Detecting Breakpoints and Estimating Segments in Trend), to analyze the greatest changes in p...

Assessing the relative contribution of Land Use and Cover Changes (LUCC) and climate changes on runoff still represents a great challenge for water resources management. This issue is particularly critical for the Upper Paraná River Basin (UPRB), one of the most important basins in South America and responsible for most of the production of food, e...

Within a single region, it is possible to identify opposite changes in flow production. This proved to be the case for several basins in southeastern South America. It remains challenging to the causes this behavior and whether changes in streamflow will continue at current levels or decline in the coming decades. In this study, we used the Soil Wa...

The São Francisco River Basin (SFRB) is one of the main watersheds in Brazil, standing out for generating energy and consumption, among other ecosystem services. Hence, it is important to identify hydrological drought events and the anomalous climate patterns associated with dry conditions. The Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) for 12 months was u...

The Upper Paraná River Basin (UPRB) has undergone remarkable land use and cover changes (LUCC) in recent decades. This paper analyses the hydrologic response to LUCC in the UPRB between 1985 and 2015, using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. The impacts of LUCC were examined for annual, wet, and dry season (both during calibrated and...

To date, the assessment of hydrological climate change impacts, not least on pluvial flooding, has been severely limited by i) the insufficient spatial resolution of regional climate models (RCMs) as well as ii) the simplified description of key processes, e.g., convective rainfall generation. Therefore, expectations have been high on the recent ge...

Precipitation varies spatio‐temporally in amount, intensity, and frequency. Although, much research has been conducted on analyzing precipitation patterns and variation at the global scale, trend types have still not received much attention. This study developed a new polynomial‐based model for detecting nonlinear and linear trends in a satellite p...

Study region Sixty-four river gauging stations distributed over Sweden. Study focus To investigate the influence of climate teleconnection patterns (TP) on streamflow in Sweden. Streamflow data is regionalized and the average hydrographs of each homogeneous region is divided into hydrological seasons. Thereafter the impact of different TPs on the...

This study aims at assess the importance of a conceptual representation of hydrological processes when modelling atmospheric circulation. It compares results from a regional atmospheric model that interprets land surface hydrological processes based on parameterizations with results from a two-way coupled atmosphere-hydrological model that has a pr...

The chapter 30 "Drought and Agricultural Production in the Central Andes" focuses on precipitation variability and its relation with El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the association between crop yield and ENSO. To understand the impact of ENSO on agriculture could help to implement/improve early warning systems and proactive drought managem...

The countries in the Sahel are undergoing rapid changes due to a mixture of demographic, ecological, and economic transformations. Rural livelihoods in these countries are predominantly engaged in agriculture, which is a foundational component of both food security and the general economy. The relationships between ongoing socio-economic transforma...

Ultraviolet radiation (UVR) is recognized as a driving force for phenotypic divergence. Here, we aim at assessing the ability of zooplankton to induce UVR tolerance and disentangle the relative importance of local adaptations behind the expression of such tolerance. Two populations of Daphnia pulex, derived from environments strongly differing in U...

This work presents an analysis of the observed trends in extreme precipitation events in the Paraná River Basin (PRB) from 1977 to 2016 (40 years) based on daily records from 853 stations. The Mann-Kendall (MK) test and Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) interpolation were applied to annual and seasonal precipitation, and also for four extreme precipi...

This paper developed a multi-space prediction model for seasonal precipitation using a high-resolution grid dataset (0.5° × 0.5°) together with climate indices. The model is based on principal component analyses (PCA) and artificial neural networks (ANN). Trend analyses show that mean annual and seasonal precipitation in the area is increasing depe...

This study presents a new land cover map for the Upper Paraná River Basin (UPRB-2015), with high spatial resolution (30 m), and a high number of calibration and validation sites. To the new map, 50 Landsat-8 scenes were classified with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm and their level of agreement was assessed using overall accuracy and Ka...

The Upper Paraná River Basin (UPRB) has undergone many rapid land use changes in recent decades, due to accelerating population growth. Thus, the prediction of water resources has crucial importance in improving planning and sustainable management. This paper presents a large-scale hydrological modelling of the UPRB, using the Soil and Water Assess...

Precipitation variability over the Bolivian Altiplano is strongly affected by local climate and temporal variation of large‐scale atmospheric flow. Precipitation is the main water source for drinking water and agricultural production. For this reason, a better understanding of precipitation variability and its relation with climate phenomena can pr...

In Brazil, the northeastern region (NEB) is considered one of the most vulnerable areas of the country in terms of precipitation variability due to frequent drought episodes during the rainy season. Differently from the Northern NEB (NNEB), where dry season is consistently dry, the Eastern NEB (ENEB) exhibits a high interannual variability of preci...

The high variability in the hydrological regime of the Eastern Hydrological Region (EHR) of Northeast Brazil often promotes floods and droughts, leading serious socio-economic issues. Therefore, this work aims to investigate connections between spatiotemporal hydrological variability of EHR and large-scale climate phenomena. Multivariate statistica...

Changes to agricultural systems in Sub-Saharan Africa are subject to a wide range of drivers, often resulting in rapid and nonlinear dynamics. Such dynamics are however rarely recognized in studies of trends and drivers, which usually rely on assumptions of gradual progressions, and often using highly aggregated data. This paper addresses this lack...

Modelling is an alternative solution to reduce the cost of water quality monitoring. Commonly, concentration of pollutants is estimated based on limited sampling information. Concentration of ions in rivers can be estimated using modelling strategies that involve statistics and artificial intelligence as well as the understanding of physical proces...

Hydropower makes up nearly half of Sweden's electrical energy production. However, the distribution of the water resources is not aligned with demand, as most of the inflows to the reservoirs occur during the spring flood period. This means that carefully planned reservoir management is required to help redistribute water resources to ensure optima...

Overbank floods results from historical high flows, has been the cause of severe damages and important socioeconomic issues around the world. A non-dense network of daily rainfall measurements may be unable to track the spatial and temporal heterogeneities which can drive flooding and stormwater generation. Thus, high-resolution radar rainfall data...

Lake Urmia in northwest Iran, once one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world, has shrunk by almost 90% in area and 80% in volume during the last four decades. To improve the understanding of regional differences in water availability throughout the region and to refine the existing information on precipitation variability, this study invest...

Zooplankton have evolved several mechanisms to deal with environmental threats, such as ultraviolet radiation (UVR), and in order to identify strategies inherent to organisms exposed to different UVR environments, we here examine life-history traits of two lineages of Daphnia pulex. The lineages differed in the UVR dose they had received at their p...

Zooplankton have evolved several mechanisms to deal with environmental threats, such as ultraviolet radiation (UVR), and in order to identify strategies inherent to organisms exposed to different UVR environments, we here examine life-history traits of two lineages of Daphnia pulex. The lineages differed in the UVR dose they had received at their p...

Hydropower makes up nearly half of Sweden's electrical energy production. However, the distribution of the water resources is not aligned with demand, most of the inflows to the reservoirs occur during the spring flood period. This means that carefully planned reservoir management is required to help redistribute the water resources to ensure optim...

The purpose of this study is to present and analyze previously unpublished quantitative agricultural data for the area on the shores of Lake Chad in Chad, and explore its relations to hydro-climatic factors (lake levels, rainfall and temperature). This is a rural area with livelihoods based on agropastoral and fishing activities, which are directly...

Hydrological climate change impact assessment is generally performed by following a sequence of steps from global and regional climate modelling, through data tailoring (bias-adjustment and downscaling) and hydrological modelling, to analysis and impact assessment. This “climate-hydrology-assessment chain” has been developed with a primary focus on...

Eastern Northeast Brazil (ENEB) generally experiences a high variability in precipitation in the dry season, with amplitudes that can overcome 500 mm. The understanding of this variability can help in mitigating the socio-economic issues related to the planning and management of water resources this region, which is highly vulnerable to drought. Th...

Overbank flooding caused by historically high flows, such as that in the Rio Mundaú watershed (lying between the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco) in 2010, has been the cause of widespread damage. The pur pose of work described in this paper was to propose a mapping of areas liable to flooding in the township of Rio Largo (Alagoas) in the Rio Munda...

Hydropower is a major energy source in Sweden, and proper reservoir management prior to the spring-flood onset is crucial for optimal production. This requires accurate forecasts of the accumulated discharge in the spring-flood period (i.e. the spring-flood volume, SFV). Today's SFV forecasts are generated using a model-based climatological ensembl...

The summer precipitation from June to September in the source region of the Yellow River accounts for about 70% of the annual total, and its decrease would cause further water shortage problems. Consequently, the objectives of this study are to improve the understanding of the linkages between the precipitation in the source region of the Yellow Ri...

The effect of future climate scenarios on surface and groundwater resources was simulated using a modeling approach for an artificial recharge area in arid southern Iran. Future climate data for the periods of 2010–2030 and 2030–2050 were acquired from the Canadian Global Coupled Model (CGCM 3.1) for scenarios A1B, A2, and B1. These scenarios were...

Approximately 50% of Sweden's electricity is produced by hydropower. This makes energy production in the country vulnerable to factors affecting water availability. Research has shown a positive correlation between the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and hydropower production in Norway and northern Sweden during winter months. The correlation is,...

Hydropower is a major energy source in Sweden and proper reservoir management prior to the spring flood onset is crucial for optimal production. This requires useful forecasts of the accumulated discharge in the spring flood period (i.e. the spring-flood volume, SFV). Today's SFV forecasts are generated using a model-based climatological ensemble a...

The spatial patterns of precipitation regarding physiography and atmospheric circulations in the Lake Urmia Basin have been investigated. Daily rainfall time series for the 50 most reliable precipitation stations for the period 1980-2010 were analyzed to detect the regional precipitation pattern. To identify rainfall homogeneous regions, principal...

The summer precipitation (June-September) in the source region of the Yellow River accounts for about 70% of the annual total, playing an important role in water availability. This study divided the source region of the Yellow River into homogeneous zones based on precipitation variability using cluster analysis. Summer precipitation trends and tel...

The hydrology of the Yellow River source region is expected to be affected by coming climate change. This will have repercussions for the 110 million basin inhabitants. Consequently, precipitation, temperature, and streamflow trends and periodicities during the last 50 years were investigated to identify significant changes in time and space over t...

The impact of future climate scenarios on surface and groundwater resources was simulated using a modeling approach for an artificial recharge area in arid southern Iran. Future climate data for the periods of 2010–2030 and 2030–2050 were acquired from the Canadian Global Coupled Model (CGCM 3.1) for scenarios A1B, A2, and B1. These scenarios were...

Aquifers and groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) are facing increasing pressure from water consumption, irrigation and climate change. These pressures modify groundwater levels and their temporal patterns and threaten vital ecosystem services such as arable land irrigation and ecosystem water requirements, especially during droughts. This revie...

This work describes the two-way coupling performed between the regional atmospheric model Brazilian Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (BRAMS) and the hydrological model MGB-IPH. As a first step of the atmosphere-hydrology coupling, only the water balance variables were coupled. Differences in temporal and spatial scales between MGH-IPH and BRAMS...

The aim of this study is to investigate annual variation in heavy rainfall frequency in Kyushu area (target area) located in the west of Japan and, subsequently, to demonstrate annual variation in heavy rainfall frequency relating to each synoptic field pattern recognized by using the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) developed by Kohonen (1995). The patte...

In this work, a first-order upwind and a high-order flux-limiter schemes for solving the advection–diffusion equation on unstructured grids were evaluated. The numerical schemes were implemented as a module of an unstructured two-dimensional depth-averaged circulation model for shallow lakes (IPH-UnTRIM2D), and they were applied to the Guaíba River...

The 14C content of 60 human blood serum samples from residents of Malmö (Sweden) in 1978, obtained from a biobank, has been measured to estimate the accuracy of 14C bomb-pulse dating. The difference between the date estimated using the Calibomb software and sampling date varied between −3 ± 0.4 and +0.2 ± 0.5 years. The average age deviation of all...

This study explores the short-, medium- and long-term impacts of expansion of the sugarcane plantation on the water balance of the Rio Grande Basin, Brazil, as estimated by changes in evapotranspiration, soil moisture content and surface runoff calculated by a hydrological model. Twenty years of simulation are made using three different land use sc...

The response of the terrestrial carbon cycle to climate change constitutes a considerable part of the uncertainty surrounding climate change. One of the largest sources of this uncertainty is the heterogeneity of the predictions of future climate made by different climate models (general circulation models, GCMs). Not only do GCMs differ in their c...

The hydropower industry is highly reliant on hydrological forecasts to plan and operate their installations efficiently and like all forecasting the earlier the information is available the more useful it can be, providing they have skill. The aim of this work is to understand how large scale circulation patterns (LSCP) affect the local hydrology a...

One of the largest sources of uncertainties in modelling of the future global climate is the response of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Studies have shown that it is likely that the extant land sink of carbon will weaken in a warming climate. Should this happen, a larger portion of the annual carbon dioxide emissions will remain in the atmosphere, a...

The radiocarbon concentration of different atherosclerotic plaque fragments obtained from 20 patients in Portugal, operated in 2000-2001, has been measured in order to define the year of plaque formation. A difference of 1.8-15 yr was observed, with the mean and median both 9 yr, between the bomb-pulse date estimated with the CALIBomb software and...

The radiocarbon concentration of different atherosclerotic plaque fragments obtained from 20 patients in Portugal, operated in 2000–2001, has been measured in order to define the year of plaque formation. A difference of 1.8–15 yr was observed, with the mean and median both 9 yr, between the bomb-pulse date estimated with the CALIBomb software and...

One of the largest sources of uncertainties in modelling of the future global climate is the response of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Studies have shown that it is likely that the extant land sink of carbon will weaken in a warming climate. Should this happen, a~larger portion of the annual carbon dioxide emissions will remain in the atmosphere, a...

In seasonally snow covered regions, such as Sweden, the winter precipitation often falls as snow which is temporarily stored in the snow pack during the colder months. This storage is later released over a relatively short period of intense flows during in the warmer months. These spring flood events dominate the hydrology of these regions and ther...

Surging outlet glaciers are important in draining large ice caps, but the mechanisms controlling surge periodicities are poorly known. We investigated a sediment sequence from the glacier-fed Lake Lögurinn in eastern Iceland, and our unique annually resolved data, based on sedimentary varves, imply that Eyjabakkajökull, an outlet glacier of Vatnajö...

High-elevation hydropower units in California might be sensitive to climate warming since they have been designed to take advantage of snowmelt and have low built-in storage capacities. Snowmelt is expected to shift to earlier in the year and the system might not be able to store sufficient water for release in high-electricity-demanding periods. P...

Urbanisation has burdened cities with many problems associated with growth and the physical environment. Some of the urban locations in India are becoming increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards related to precipitation and flooding. Thus it becomes increasingly important to study the characteristics of these events and their physical explanatio...

Western South America is subject to considerable inter-annual variability due to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) so forecasting inter-annual variations associated with ENSO would provide an opportunity to tailor management decisions more appropriately to the season. On one hand, the self-organizing maps (SOM) method is a suitable technique to e...

Climate warming is expected to alter hydropower generation in California through affecting the annual stream-flow regimes and reducing snowpack. On the other hand, increased temperatures are expected to increase hydropower demand for cooling in warm periods while decreasing demand for heating in winter, subsequently altering the annual hydropower p...

Over the last two decades there has been little improvement in the accuracy of hydrological forecasts of spring floods in Sweden and hydropower accounts for nearly 47 percent of Sweden's energy production. A new research project at SMHI in collaboration with Lund University proposes to develop a multi-method system of forecast-ing the spring floods...

This work investigates the predictability of seasonal to inter-annual streamflow over several river basins in Norway through the use of multi-model ensembles. As general circulation models (GCMs) do not explicitly simulate streamflow, a statistical link is made between GCM-forecast fields generated in December and average streamflow in the melting...

Paleomagnetic data, although undeniably limited, have been used to constrain complex time-varying geomagnetic field models. Here we present four different versions of a time varying geocentric dipole model for the past approximately 9000 years based on a limited selection of sedimentary paleomagnetic data with good spatial coverage. The robustness...

Striberger, J., Björck, S., Ingólfsson, Ó., Kjær, K. H., Snowball, I. & Uvo, C. B. 2010: Climate variability and glacial processes in eastern Iceland during the past 700 years based on varved lake sediments. Boreas, 10.1111/j.1502-3885.2010.00153.x. ISSN 0300-9483. Properties of varved sediments from Lake Lögurinn in eastern Iceland and their link...

Agriculture is vulnerable to the interannual climate variability and to its unpredictability, in such a way that most agricultural decisions taken within the time horizon of several months are made in a conservative manner, supposing a near-pessimist scenario. The improvement of climate prediction may help the strategic view, mitigating unwanted im...

Properties of varved lake sediments from Lake Lögurinn on eastern Iceland and their link to glacial processes of Eyjabakkajökull, a surging outlet glacier of the Vatnajökull ice cap, is examined. An 18 m long sediment sequence obtained from the lake, covering at least the past ~ 9 200 years, displays a distinct recurring pattern of light-coloured c...

Rivers discharging into the Mediterranean Sea strongly influences salinity regionally and circulation in the sea. At long-term, river discharge for most of the rivers within the Mediterranean Sea basin have been strongly controlled by human activities such as construction of dams and water use for irrigation. However, a climatic signal on a scale o...

How the variability of the atmospheric circulation affects precipitation in Iceland is not completely understood. Also, the sea surface temperature (SST) has a strong influence on the temperature over the country, and thereby, snow and glacial melt. This study, therefore, aims at explaining how atmospheric circulation and sea surface temperature in...

This study reports on the performance of two medium-range streamflow forecast models: (1) a multilayer feed-forward artificial neural network; and (2) a distributed hydrologic model. Quantitative precipitation forecasts were used as input to both models. The Furnas Reservoir on the Rio Grande River was selected as a case study, primarily because of...

The analysis of annual extremes of hydrological and meteorological variables is frequently complicated by the presence of gaps in record, and when records are not only fragmented but also short, it is necessary to utilize to the full the information contained in them. One method is to abstract for statistical analysis all extreme events whose peaks...

RESUMO A evapotranspiração é uma das variáveis mais importantes do ciclo hidrológico, consistindo na ligação entre ener-gia, clima e disponibilidade hídrica. É considerado um fenômeno bastante complexo, pois depende da interação entre diver-sas variáveis climáticas e do tipo e estágio de desenvolvimento da vegetação. O objetivo deste trabalho foi a...

This paper presents results of analyses by parametric methods of annual means of temperature, precipitation and discharge, and of seasonal maximum precipitation at 17, 28 and 10 Icelandic stations, respectively, for the period 1961-2000. Trends in mean seasonal temperature and precipitation are in broad agreement with results found by other authors...

Gaps in measured discharge series are common in Iceland, especially during winter, but reconstructed series are needed for a number of applications. Modeled series are therefore sometimes used to fill the gaps to create a continuous series, but the modeled inserts may have different statistical characteristics from the observed series, whilst their...

A seasonal forecasting technique to produce probabilistic and deterministic streamflow forecasts for 23 basins in Norway and northern Sweden is developed in this work. Large scale circulation and moisture fields, forecasted by the ECHAM4.5 model 4 months in advance, are used to forecast spring flows. The technique includes model output statistics (...

The characteristics of fine time-scale rainfall are important in many hydrological applications, such as infiltration, erosion and flooding. The spatial properties of such rainfall are, however, seldom known, especially for arid and semi-arid areas. A better knowledge of fine time-scale rainfall and also comparison with daily rainfall may yield pos...

The relationship between monthly sea-surface temperature (SST) in the tropical Pacific and the Indian Ocean and monthly precipitation over the Vietnamese central highlands (VCH) has been investigated by means of singular value decomposition. The seasonal variation of SST plays a critical role in the onset of the monsoon season and convective rain b...

In order to systematically and visually understand well-known but qualitative and complex relationships between synoptic fields and heavy rainfall events in Kyushu Islands, southwestern Japan, during the BAIU season, these synoptic fields were classified using the Self-Organizing Map (SOM), which can convert complex non-linear features into simple...

Rainfall over the Vietnamese central highlands is governed by the Asian summer monsoon. The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and related large-scale circulation anomalies, however, introduce disturbances that may lead to drought in the central highlands. Droughts cannot be prevented, but the consequences for human livelihood and econo...

River runoff forecasting is one of the most complex areas of research in hydrology because of the uncertainty of hydrological and meteorological parameters and scarcity of adequate records. Artificial neural networks (ANN) can be an efficient way of modeling stream flow processes as it is capable of controlling and modelling nonlinear and complex s...

River runoff forecasting is one of the most complex areas of research in hydrology because of the uncertainty of hydrological and meteorological parameters and scarcity of adequate records. Artificial neural networks (ANN) can be an efficient way of modeling stream flow processes as it is capable of controlling and modelling nonlinear and complex s...

This study is a part of a Nordic co-operative research project, Climate and Energy, funded by Nordic Energy Research and the Nordic energy sector. The project has the objective of a comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate change on Nordic renewable energy resources including hydropower, wind power, biofuels and solar energy. In this paper...

Runoff estimation is of high importance for many practical engineering applications so that, e.g. power production, dam safety and water supply can be ensured. The methods and time step relevant for runoff simulations vary depending on the location and the application. Long-term runoff simulation for Scandinavia is of high importance as its hydropo...

Dramatic swings in the North Atlantic oscillation (NAO) during the 1990s motivated the authors to build a statistical model of NAO impacts on hydropower production and energy markets in Scandinavia. Variation in the NAO index is shown to explain 55% of the variance of streamflow in Norway and up to 30% of the variance in Norway's hydropower output....

The monsoon governs the life in Vietnam. A better forecast of the monthly summer monsoon rainfall over the Vietnamese central highland would contribute significantly to water resources planning and management in terms of, e.g., improved reservoir operation, agricultural practice and, in particular, the mitigation of droughts over the region. Statis...