David Johnny Peres

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Catania

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a major driver of extreme rainfall intensification worldwide. Quantifying its effects on extreme rainfall, expressed through depth-duration-frequency curves (DDFs), is crucial for designing flood protection infrastructures. In this study, we propose a methodology for deriving future DDFs under RCP 4.5 an...

In this study, a spatiotemporal analysis of drought occurrence and trends across Sicily using ERA50-Land continuous gridded data is carried out. We first use the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to evaluate drought conditions at various time scales from 1950 to 2023. Then, the...

I cambiamenti climatici pongono nuove sfide per l'approvvigionamento idrico, a causa della potenziale diminuzione delle precipitazioni e dell'aumento delle temperature, che possono insieme indurre una riduzione della disponibilità idrica futura. È quindi importante quantificare tali impatti al fine di implementare opportune misure di adattamento. N...

Landslide prediction is key for the development of early warning systems. In this work, we develop artificial neural networks (ANNs) that can identify landslide triggering conditions using soil moisture data in addition to precipitation. In particular, we use observed precipitation and ERA5-Land reanalysis soil moisture data at four different depth...

Assessing and monitoring the spatial extent of drought is of key importance to forecasting the future evolution of drought conditions and taking timely preventive and mitigation measures. A commonly used approach in regional drought analysis involves spatially interpolating meteorological variables (e.g., rainfall depth during specific time interva...

A modelling framework for the simulation of stormwater runoff in ground-mounted photovoltaic solar parks is proposed. Elements in the solar park and their mutual interactions during precipitation events are conceptualized in EPA-SWMM. We demonstrate the potential of the framework by exploring how different factors influence runoff formation. Specif...

Drought is often monitored through standardized indices. However, while enabling comparisons across different climatic regions, standardization poses an issue when using indices to assess future climate change impacts on drought, since they have a null average by definition. To address this issue, in this study we introduce a dynamic approach where...

Flash droughts develop and intensify rapidly under the influence of abnormally high temperatures, wind speed, radiation and declining of the normal precipitation rate. The changing of Potential evapotranspiration (PET) and soil moisture is considered as key early warning and development of flash drought indicators. In this study, we first analyse s...

Water resources management is becoming increasingly challenging under current climate change. Water utilities need to assess planning adaptation strategies aimed at sustainable water resource exploitation. In this study, we estimate the potential impacts of climate change on hydrological variables and future spring discharge availability. Specifica...

The vulnerability of large areas to drought events emphasizes the importance of a reliable probability analysis of drought events. A drought is notoriously considered as one of the most complex natural phenomena, which, more than other natural hazards, remains difficult to quantitatively model due to the difficulty of sampling a sufficient number o...

Climate change and the related temperature rise can cause an increase in evapotranspiration. Thus, the assessment of potential evapotranspiration (PET) trends is important to identify possible ongoing signals of climate change, in order to develop adaptation measures for water resource management and improve irrigation efficiency. In this study, we...

Reservoir areas are usually prone to geological disasters due to the significant changes takingplace on the hydrogeological environment (Zhou et al., 2022a). For instance, more than5,000 geological disasters have been reported in the Three Gorges Reservoir area, China.Extreme climate and human engineering activities have aggravated the occurrence o...

Climate change linked to human activities is affecting natural systems, increasing frequency and severity of water-related hazards. The issue of climate change pushes to tackle the expected risks in the water sector through a comprehensive and global view, with a revision of the paradigms considered as drivers of water resources development. Based...

Investigating the trends of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) is fundamental importance for water resource management in agriculture, climate variability analysis, and other hydroclimate-related projects. Moreover, it would be useful for understanding the sensitivity of such trends to basic meteorological variables, as the modifications of these v...

A key component for landslide early warning systems (LEWSs) is constituted by thresholds providing the conditions above which a landslide can be triggered. Traditionally, thresholds based on rainfall characteristics have been proposed, but recently, the hydrometeorological approach, combining rainfall with soil moisture or catchment storage informa...

Natural disasters observed in recent decades highlight the vulnerability of many areas to extreme events such as heavy rainfall, hot waves and droughts. These hazards are expected to be further exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change and increase their cumulative effects, potentially posing severe threats to human, socio-economic sectors and na...

Drought is a complex and multifaceted natural phenomenon whose effects may have serious environmental and socio-economic impacts on communities. Drought is a multi-year phenomenon and thus its probabilistic characterization needs long instrumental records. As a possible way to overcome the limitation posed by the paucity of long-term historical rec...

Large-scale photovoltaic (PV) power plants may affect the hydrological cycle in all its components. Among the various components, evapotranspiration is one of the most important. As a preliminary step for assessing the impacts of PV plants on evapotranspiration, in this study, we performed an evaluation study of methods for estimating reference eva...

In recent times, several efforts have been addressed to understand the extent to which soil moisture estimations may improve the performance of landslide early warning systems (LEWSs). These systems have been traditionally based on rainfall intensity-duration thresholds. Still a limited number of studies explore the possible enhancement of the perf...

Extreme hydrometeorological events (e [...]

Climate change has potential impacts on the hydrological cycle components, especially those strongly related to temperature, such as evapotranspiration. Assessing trends of the reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and of the related climatic factors is essential for improving water resource management especially with reference to watershed hydrology...

In this communication we show how the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) can improve the performance of the rainfall thresholds for landslide early warning. Results for Sicily (Italy) show how performance of a traditional rainfall event duration and depth power law threshold, yielding a true skill statistic (TSS) of 0.50, can be improved by A...

To mark the 20th anniversary of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), an interdisciplinary and international journal dedicated to the public discussion and open-access publication of high-quality studies and original research on natural hazards and their consequences, we highlight 11 key publications covering major subject areas of NHE...

Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) can provide valuable information for local governments in landslide prevention and mitigation. Despite significant improvements in the predic-tive performance of LSM, it remains a challenge to be carried out in areas with limited availability of data. For example, in the early stage of road construction, lands...

To mark the twentieth anniversary of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), an interdisciplinary and international journal dedicated to the public discussion and open-access publication of high-quality studies and original research on natural hazards and their consequences, we highlight eleven key publications covering major subject are...

In this communication we show how the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) can improve the performance of the rainfall thresholds for landslide early warning. Results for Sicily (Italy), show how performance of a traditional rainfall event duration and depth power law threshold, yielding a true skill statistic (TSS) of 0.50, can be improved by...

Rainfall intensity-duration landslide-triggering thresholds have become widespread for the development of landslide early warning systems. Thresholds can be in principle determined using rainfall event datasets of three types: (a) rainfall events associated with landslides (triggering rainfall) only, (b) rainfall events not associated with landslid...

In this study, we compare infinite slope and the three-dimensional stability analysis performed by SCOOPS 3D (software to analyze three-dimensional slope stability throughout a digital landscape). SCOOPS 3D is a model proposed by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS), the potentialities of which have still not been investigated sufficiently. The compa...

Intensive urbanization and related increase of impervious surfaces, causes negative impacts on the hydrological cycle, amplifying the risk of urban floods. These impacts can get even worse due to potential climate change impacts. The urban areas of the Simeto River Valley (SRV), the largest river valley in Sicily (Italy), have been repeatedly hit b...

Many recent studies indicate climate change as a phenomenon that significantly alters the water cycle in different regions worldwide, also implying new challenges in water resource management and drought risk assessment. To this end, it is of key importance to ascertain the quality of regional climate models (RCMs), which are commonly used for asse...

Empirical thresholds indicating the meteorological conditions leading to shallow landslide triggering are one of the most important components of landslide early warning systems (LEWS). Thresholds have been determined for many parts of the globe and present significant margins of improvement, especially for the high number of false alarms they prod...

The issue of climate change has received growing attention in recent years, from science to politics and mass media. It poses new challenges in water resources management, in all aspects: water scarcity, droughts, floods and landslides. Several scientific studies have been carried out to assess the potential future impacts of climate change on wate...

Abstract. Many recent studies indicate climate change as a phenomenon that significantly alters the water cycle in different regions worldwide, also implying new challenges in water resources management and drought risk assessment. To this end, it is of key importance to ascertain the quality of Regional Climate Models (RCMs), which are commonly us...

Nel manuale viene trattata una serie di informazioni fondamentali per comprendere, monitorare e fronteggiare i fenomeni di siccità e scarsità idrica e sono approfonditi i principali aspetti e le strategie da tenere in considerazione per evitare o comunque contenere al massimo il fenomeno delle crisi idriche.

Climate change induced by greenhouse gas emissions is expected to alter the natural availability of water, affecting domestic, agricultural and industrial uses. This work aims at assessing the possible future impacts of climate change on precipitation, temperature and runoff, and to simulate the effects on reservoir demand–performance curves. To th...

Quantifying the potential influence of climate change on future landslide hazard requires methodologies that allow to properly take into account nonstationarities in the hydro-meteorological causes. In this paper we provide a methodology for estimating return period of landslide triggering under climate change. The methodology capitalizes on the co...

Design and operation of hydraulic infrastructures require the assessment of quantiles of peak flow discharge, which is generally carried out through the fitting of a parametric probability function to an observed series of peak flows. However, in many cases, peak flow series are only partially available, or not available at all, while records of me...

Uncertainty in rainfall datasets and landslide inventories is known to have negative impacts on the assessment of landslide-triggering thresholds. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of the impacts of uncertain knowledge of landslide initiation instants on the assessment of rainfall intensity–duration landslide early warning threshold...

Uncertainty in rainfall datasets and landslide inventories is known to have negative impacts on the assessment of landslide–triggering thresholds. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of the impacts that the uncertain knowledge of landslide initiation instants have on the assessment of landslide intensity–duration early warning thresho...

Climate change due to atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions may cause significant modifications to precipitation and other meteorological processes, with potential consequences on the frequency of occurrence of shallow landslides. This study aims at investigating the potential effects of climate-change induced rainfall modifications on the future oc...

Rainfall-induced shallow slides can evolve into debris flows that move rapidly downstream with devastating consequences. Mapping the susceptibility to debris flow is an important aid for risk mitigation. We propose a novel practical approach to derive debris flow inundation maps useful for susceptibility assessment, that is based on the integrated...

The concepts of hydrological alteration and the related natural flow paradigm conceive variable environmental flows that preserve as much as possible the natural variability of flows, with a particular focus on a suite of specific characteristics, the so-called indicators of hydrological alteration (IHA). In the paper we propose a simple simulation...

Landslides are typical non stationary processes, since they are a mass wasting process bringing toward equilibrium the earth surface. While at the hillslope scale sources of non-stationarity are inherent to the nature of the process, at the regional scale one of the potentially causes of non-stationarity of landslide frequency is climate change. In...

Assessment of landslide hazard is a crucial step for landslide mitigation planning. Estimation of the return period of slope instability represents a quantitative method to map landslide triggering hazard on a catchment. The most common approach to estimate return periods consists in coupling a triggering threshold equation, derived from an hydrolo...

Accuracy of wave climate assessment is related to the length of available observed records of sea state variables of interest (significant wave height, mean direction, mean period, etc.). Data availability may be increased by record extension methods.In the paper, we investigate the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) fed with reanalysis wind...

Extreme rainfall events and subsequent triggering of shallow landslides hit many regions worldwide, and climatic change increases the frequency of these phenomena, so that there is an increased need of appropriate risk mitigation tools. SCIDDICA-SS3 is a semi-empirical Cellular Automata (CA) model for simulating the run-out of debris/mud flows. In...

This research analyses the main debris flows originated by high intensity rainfall, concentrated in few hours, in Giampilieri Superiore zone, October 1st, 2009. This catastrophic event devastated the Peloritani Mountains (Sicily) and caused more than 500 landslides, mostly debris flows, with 30 deaths and thousands of evacuated people. Main debris...

In this study, a Monte Carlo simulation approach is proposed for mapping landslide hazard in terms of return period, in order to account for both rainfall high frequency variability and antecedent precipitation that determine initial conditions. The Monte Carlo approach combines a stochastic rainfall generator with a physically-based landslide trig...

Rainfall thresholds are the basis of early warning systems able to promptly warn about the potential triggering of landslides in an area. Following a common empirical methodology, thresholds may be derived through the analysis of historical rainfall and landslide data, by drawing an envelope curve of triggering rainfall events, represented by their...

Assessment of landslide-triggering rainfall thresholds is useful for early warning in prone areas. In this paper, it is shown how stochastic rainfall models and hydrological and slope stability physically based models can be advantageously combined in a Monte Carlo simulation framework to generate virtually unlimited-length synthetic rainfall and...

Drought is a natural phenomenon that presents spatial and temporal features whose knowledge is fundamental for an appropriate water resources management. In particular, the assessment of probabilities and return periods of areal extent of droughts of different severities over a region can provide useful information for planning drought management....

A reliable assessment of drought return periods is essential to help decision makers in setting effective drought preparedness and mitigation measures. However, often an inferential approach is unsuitable to model the marginal or joint probability distributions of drought characteristics, such as drought duration and accumulated deficit, due to the...

Extreme rainfall is the main cause of landslides and, depending on the magnitude of the rainfall event and the geomorphological characteristics of the landslide-prone area, its occurrence can lead to debris-flows, causing higher damage than floods. Empirical rainfall thresholds of landslide triggering have been proposed by researchers and used as a...

Identification of the characteristics of rainfall events potentially leading to landslides plays a key role in the implementation of early warning systems, oriented to reduce the victims and the damages caused by these natural hazards. Due to their geomorphological features and also to the lack of adequate mitigation infrastructures, hilly and moun...

Extreme rainfall is the main cause of shallow landslides. For risk mitigation, landslide early warning systems can be implemented, on the basis of rainfall monitoring and forecasting, and the use of a landslide triggering model. Several empirical, also referred to as statistical, rainfall-landslide triggering models have been proposed in the scient...