Stefania Camici

• PhD
• Italian National Research Council

The roadmap to enable operational soil moisture (SM) monitoring for meteorologic and hydrological early warning is challenged by the uncertainty within the available remote sensing and modelling products. This study addressed two relevant uncertainties: the residual trends in the series and the spatial consistency. While the latter has been often r...

Climate change is profoundly affecting the global water cycle, increasing the likelihood and severity of extreme water-related events. Better decision-support systems are vital to accurately predict and monitor water-related environmental disasters and optimally manage water resources. These must integrate advances in remote sensing, in situ, and c...

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 Surface Topography Mission (STM) Land Altimetry provides valuable surface elevation information over inland waters, sea ice, and land ice, thanks to its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) altimeter and its orbit that covers high-latitude polar regions. To ensure that these measurements are reliable and to maximise the return o...

The event runoff coefficient (i.e. the ratio between event runoff and precipitation that originated the runoff) is a key factor for understanding basin response to precipitation events. Runoff coefficient depends on precipitation intensity and duration but also on specific basin geohydrology attributes (including soil type, geology, land cover, top...

In most African countries, the lack of observed rainfall data is a major obstacle for efficient water resources management. The objective of this study is to evaluate satellite rainfall products’ ability to estimate river runoff over 12 basins in Morocco using four hydrological models: IHACRES, MISDc, GR4J, and CREST. Satellite products available w...

Agricultural droughts are extreme events which are often a result of interplays between multiple hydro-meteorological processes. Therefore, assessing drought occurrence, extent, duration and intensity is complex and requires the combined use of multiple variables, such as temperature, rainfall, soil moisture (SM) and vegetation state. The benefit o...

This paper presents an innovative approach, STREAM – SaTellite-based Runoff Evaluation And Mapping – to derive daily river discharge and runoff estimates from satellite observations of soil moisture, precipitation, and total water storage anomalies (TWSAs). Within a very simple model structure, precipitation and soil moisture data are used to estim...

Inundation is one of the major natural hazards in Europe. The evaluation of the flood hazard and risk is not straightforward mainly due to the monitoring system that is poor or not uniformly distributed in the territory. The ESA Earth Observation Program, including a series of satellites, Sentinels, for the operative observation of the natural phen...

Rainfall deficits that develop into socio-economic droughts have triggered major humanitarian crises in recent years, and are expected to become even more frequent as a result of climate change. Earth observation methods are very useful for drought hazard assessment as they are available globally at high spatiotemporal resolutions. In this study, w...

In a warming climate, periods with lower than average precipitation will increase in frequency and intensity. During such periods, known as meteorological droughts, the decline in annual runoff may be proportionally larger than the corresponding decline in precipitation. Reasons behind this exacerbation of runoff deficit during dry periods remain l...

Inundation is one of the major natural hazards in Europe. The evaluation of the flood hazard and risk is not straightforward mainly due to the monitoring system that is poor or not uniformly distributed in the territory. The ESA Earth Observation Program, including a series of satellites, Sentinels, for the operative observation of the natural phen...

Determining the spatiotemporal variability in the annual streamflow volume plays a relevant role in hydrology with regard to improving and implementing sustainable and resilient policies and practices of water resource management. This study investigates annual streamflow volume trends in a newly assembled, consolidated, and validated data set of d...

Changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme hydrological events (floods and droughts) are one of the most significance consequences of the climate change and their monitoring is therefore essential in many fields. However, the number of the global in situ discharge measurements has been declining since the eighties and the global supply of av...

The development of forecasting models for the evaluation of potential slope instability after rainfall events represents an important issue for the scientific community. This topic has received considerable impetus due to the climate change effect on territories, as several studies demonstrate that an increase in global warming can significantly in...

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and mo...

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and mo...

The development of forecasting models for the evaluation of potential slope instability after rainfall event represents an important issue for the scientific community. This topic has received considerable impetus due to climate change effect on the territory [1, 2] as several studies demonstrate that the increase in global warming can significantl...

In this study, we perform a data assimilation (DA) experiment on a very large number (>700) of small- and medium-scale (150–10,000 km2) European catchments to assess the impact of satellite soil moisture (SM) DA on streamflow simulations for different climatic and hydrologic conditions. In the experiment, Climate Change Initiative SM active, passiv...

In a warming climate, periods with below-than-average precipitation will increase in frequency and intensity. During such periods, known as meteorological droughts, sparse but consistent pieces of evidence show that the decline in annual runoff may be proportionally larger than the corresponding decline in precipitation (e.g., −40 % vs. −20 %). Rea...

Future climate scenarios for the Mediterranean region indicate a possible decrease in annual precipitation associated with an intensification of extreme rainfall events in the coming years. A major challenge in this region is to evaluate the impacts of changing precipitation patterns on extreme hydrological events such as droughts and floods. For t...

This paper presents an innovative approach, STREAM – SaTellite based Runoff Evaluation And Mapping – to derive daily river discharge and runoff estimates from satellite soil moisture, precipitation and terrestrial water storage anomalies observations. Within a very simple model structure, the first two variables (precipitation and soil moisture) ar...

Intermittent rivers are prevalent in many countries across Europe, but little is known about the temporal evolution of intermittence and its relationship with climate variability. Trend analysis of the annual and seasonal number of zero-flow days, the maximum duration of dry spells and the mean date of the zero-flow events is performed on a databas...

The global availability of satellite rainfall products (SRPs) at an increasingly high temporal and spatial resolution has made their exploitation in hydrological applications possible, especially in data-scarce regions. In this context, understanding how uncertainties transfer from SRPs to river discharge simulations, through the hydrological model...

Satellite precipitation products have been largely improved in the recent years particularly with the launch of the global precipitation measurement (GPM) core satellite. Moreover, the development of techniques for exploiting the information provided by satellite soil moisture to complement/enhance precipitation products have improved the accuracy...

Future climate scenarios for the Mediterranean region indicate a possible decrease in annual precipitation associated with an intensification of extreme rainfall events in the coming years. A major challenge in this region is to evaluate the impacts of changing precipitation patterns on extreme hydrological events such as droughts and floods. For t...

The standard approach for measuring instantaneous rainfall rates from space is based on the inversion of the atmospheric signals reflected or radiated by atmospheric hydrometeors, i.e., a “top-down” approach. Recently, a new “bottom-up” approach has been proposed that exploits satellite soil moisture observations for obtaining accumulated rainfall...

Abstract. The global availability of satellite rainfall products (SRPs) at an increasingly high temporal/spatial resolution has made possible their exploitation in hydrological applications, especially over in-situ data scarce regions. In this context, understand how uncertainties transfer from SRPs into flood simulation, through the hydrological m...

Soil moisture is a highly suitable indicator for assessing agricultural drought, as plants start to wilt when there is not sufficient soil water to meet evapotranspiration demand. In this study, we provide insights on information obtained from satellite surface soil moisture observations (as compared to modelled soil moisture and observed ground pr...

Abstract. Determining the spatio-temporal variability of annual streamflow volume plays a relevant role in hydrology for improving and implementing sustainable and resilient policies and practices of water resource management. This study investigates annual streamflow volume trends in a newly-assembled, consolidated and validated dataset of daily m...

Selecting the best structure and parameterization of rainfall–runoff models is not straightforward and depends on a broad number of factors. In this study, the “Modello Idrologico Semi-Distribuito in continuo” (MISDc) was tested on 63 mountainous catchments in the western Po Valley (Italy) and the optimal model parameters were regionalized using di...

Long-term gridded precipitation products are crucial for several applications in hydrology, agriculture and climate sciences. Currently available precipitation products suffer from space and time inconsistency due to the non-uniform density of ground networks and the difficulties in merging multiple satellite sensors. The recent “bottom-up” approac...

A novel procedure for estimation of the vulnerability to seepage inducing piping processes in earthen levees affected by animal burrows is presented. The proposed methodology combines an available procedure of seepage vulnerability assessment for undamaged levees with the result of a finite element analysis software, which is used for identifying t...

The monitoring of rivers is not the primary objective of the Sentinel-3 mission. The first satellite of the constellation was launched in February 2016 and so far no study has investigated the joint use of altimeter, near-infrared and thermal sensors for discharge estimation. Nevertheless, similar sensors onboard other platforms have showed their a...

In a changing climate, assessing the effects that the variation of the expected rainfalls can cause to slope stability is of primary importance. Precipitations are expected to increase, and, in particular, there will be more events characterised by extreme rainfalls, which legitimates the possibility of an increase in landslide activity. A probabil...

Long-term gridded precipitation products are crucial for several applications in hydrology, agriculture and climate sciences. Currently available precipitation products obtained from rain gauges, remote sensing and meteorological modelling suffer from space and time inconsistency due to non-uniform density of ground networks and the difficulties in...

This work investigates the potential of using the Bayesian-based Model Conditional Processor (MCP) for complementing satellite precipitation products with a rainfall dataset derived from satellite soil moisture observations. MCP – which is a Bayesian Inversion approach – was originally developed for predictive uncertainty estimates of water level a...

Satellite-based rainfall products (SRPs) are nowadays available at ever increasing accuracy and higher spatial and temporal resolution with respect to the past. Despite this, they are scarcely used in hydrological modeling. The main reasons may be related to: 1) the large bias characterizing satellite precipitation estimates, which is dependent on...

Many satellite soil moisture products are today globally available in near real-time. These observations are of paramount importance for enhancing the understanding of the hydrological cycle and particularly useful for flood forecasting purposes. In recent decades, several studies assimilated satellite soil moisture observations into rainfall-runof...

First results on the assimilation of the CCI soil moisture products (active , passive and combined) into a hydrological model in about 100 catchments in Europe

Extensive flooding can be the result of levee system failures most frequently caused by the piping process due to seepage. The proper description of the seepage line is affected by the difficulty of estimating the hydraulic parameters, mainly the soil hydraulic conductivity. Therefore, the development of simple methods for a quick analysis of exten...

Remote sensing of soil moisture has reached a level of good maturity and accuracy for which the retrieved products are ready to use in real-world applications. Due to the importance of soil moisture in the partitioning of the water and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere, a wide range of applications can benefit from the avail...

The objective of this study is to explore the feasibility of using Satellite Rainfall Products (SRPs) in a lumped hydrologic model (MISDc, “Modello Idrologico Semi-Distribuito in continuo”, Masseroni et al., 2017) over 15 basins in the Mediterranean area with different sizes and physiographic characteristics. Specifically, TMPA 3B42-RT, CMORPH, PER...

Climatic extremes are changing and decision-makers express a strong need for reliable information on future changes over the coming decades as a basis for adaption strategies. In the hydrological-hydraulic context, to estimate changes on floods, a modelling chain composed by General Circulation Models (GCMs), Bias Correction (BC) methods and hydrol...

Soil moisture is widely recognized as a key parameter in the mass and energy balance between the land surface and the atmosphere and, hence, the potential societal benefits of an accurate estimation of soil moisture are immense. Recently, scientific community is making a big effort for addressing the estimation of soil moisture over large areas thr...

Traditionally, slope stability assessments are based on stationary expected extreme rainfalls, provided by the Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves. More recent approaches are based on projected rainfall scenarios, considering the expected climatic trends provided by General Circulation Models (GCMs). The projected rainfalls used in this study have...

Extensive flooding is frequently the result of levee system failures most frequently caused by the piping process due to seepage. The proper description of the seepage line within the levee body is affected by the difficulty of estimating the hydraulic parameters, mainly the soil hydraulic conductivity. Therefore, the development of simple methods...

Landslides are frequent and widespread geomorphological phenomena causing loss of human life and damage to property. The main tool for assessing landslide risk relies on rainfall thresholds and thus, many countries established early warning systems aimed to landslide hazard assessment. The Umbria Region Civil Protection Centre developed an operatio...

A simplified model for calculating satellite based surface runoff.

Many rainfall-runoff (RR) models are available in the scientific literature. Selecting the best structure and parameterization for a model is not straightforward and depends on a wide number of factors, including climatic conditions, catchment characteristics, temporal/spatial resolution and model objectives. In this study, the RR model MISDc ("Mod...

It is generally accepted that climate change exists. Already the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 2007 Synthesis Report confirmed that warming in climate system is unequivocal and that impacts of human-caused climate change are evident worldwide. Instrumental observations over the past 100 years (between 1906 and 2005) show t...

In this paper, an uncertainty analysis of the processing chain from General Circulation Models scenarios to impact on an alluvial aquifer is presented. To this goal, we examined the forecast climate change impact on the Umbra Valley aquifer (central Italy), in which the human pressures in terms of groundwater usage are significant. In order to unde...

There are many evidences that the combined effects of variations in precipitation and temperature due to climate change can result in a significant change of the recharge to groundwater at different time scales. A possible reduction of effective infiltration can result in a significant decrease, temporary or permanent, of the availability of the re...

The function allows to rescale the input data (SAT) to match the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of benchmark data (OBS). The code, freely available here, is written in the MATLAB® programming language and is fully commented. Major details can be found in : L. Brocca et. al. (2011), Soil moisture estimation through ASCAT and AMSR-E sensors:...

The levee failure event occurred along the Foenna stream (Tuscany region, central Italy) on 1st January 2006 is investigated. The levee body vulnerability to seepage is first assessed through a procedure here proposed and based on a simple vulnerability index. In particular, the index is defined for dimensionless geometry of levee body and related...

The issue of bridge piers vulnerability to scour is addressed by comparing two procedures. The first method quantifies the Scour Vulnerability Index (SVI) considering the combined effects of local and contraction scour. The method requires that a scale factor, for taking account of the scour depth overestimation provided by empirical formulae, is q...

The analysis of the climate change impact on flood frequency represents an important issue for water resources management and flood risk mitigation. However, for small-medium catchments (<1000 km²), the spatial-temporal resolution of Global Circulation Models (GCMs) output is not adequate (>40000 km²) and downscaling procedures are required. In thi...

The Fractionally differenced ARIMA model (FARIMA) model for the generation of synthetic temperature data was made freely available here. The code is written in the MATLAB® programming language and is fully commented. The description of the model structure and of its performance can be found in Camici et al. (2011).

The management of water resources always requires more and diverse approaches in which multiple skills and capacities are nested together, especially when critical situations are taken into account, such as climate change scenarios. The SimBaT software is a Decision Support Systems for water resource allocation and management. In this study, SimBaT...

Most of the scientific community agrees that global climate change is occurring with a general increase in mean overall temperature (+0.74±0.18°C from 1906-2005). Although it is not clear how these climatic changes will affect precipitation patterns in the near future, as well as in the past, however there is evidence that the precipitation pattern...

The Neyman-Scott Rectangular Pulse (NSRP) model for the generation of synthetic rainfall data was made freely available here. The code is written in the MATLAB® programming language and is fully commented. The description of the model structure and of its performance can be found in Camici et al. (2011, WRR), Tarpanelli et al. (2012, JoH) and Brocc...

Soil moisture is widely recognized as a fundamental variable governing the mass and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. In this study, the soil moisture modelling at sub-daily time scale is addressed by using an accurate representation of the infiltration component. For that, the Semi-Analytical infiltration model proposed by...

Most of the scientific community agrees that global climate change is occurring with a general increase in mean overall temperature (+0.74±0.18°C from 1906-2005) and that the precipitation pattern in Europe is trending toward wetter conditions in the northern region and drier conditions in the southern and central-eastern regions. A much larger unc...

Global climate models (GCMs) are the primary tool to assess future climate change. However, most GCMs currently do not provide reliable information on scales below about 100 km and, hence, cannot be used as a direct input of hydrological models for climate change impact assessments. Therefore, a wide range of statistical and dynamical downscaling m...

Hydraulic models are an essential tool in many fields, e.g. civil engineering, flood hazard and risk assessments, evaluation of flood control measures, etc. Nowadays there are many models of different complexity regarding the mathematical foundation and spatial dimensions available, and most of them are comparatively easy to operate due to sophisti...

In northern Morocco are located most of the dams and reservoirs of the country, while this region is affected by severe rainfall events causing floods. To improve the management of the water regulation structures, there is a need to develop rainfall–runoff models to both maximize the storage capacity and reduce the risks caused by floods. In this s...

Rainfall scenarios are of considerable interest for design flood and flood risk analysis. To this end, the stochastic generation of continuous rainfall sequences is often coupled with the continuous hydrological modelling. In this context, the spatial and the temporal rainfall variability represents a significant issue, especially for basins in whi...

In Northern Morocco are located most of the dams and reservoirs of the country, while this region is affected by severe rainfall events causing floods. To improve the management of the water regulation structures, there is a need to develop rainfall-runoff models to both maximize the storage capacity and reduce the risks caused by floods. In this s...

The analysis of the effects of climate changing scenarios on the frequency of floods represents an important issue for water resources management and flood risk mitigation. However, for small-medium catchments (<1000 km2), the spatialtemporal resolution of the output of Global Circulation Models (GCMs) is not adequate (>40000 km2) and downscaling p...

The relationship between climate change and floods frequency is of great interest for addressing the complex analysis on the hydrologic cycle evolution. In this context, this study aims to assess, by a preliminary investigation, the climate change effects on the floods frequency in several basins of the upper Tiber River, whose area is ranging from...

Cited By (since 1996): 3, Export Date: 4 April 2012, Source: Scopus, Art. No.: W05527

In recent years local, national, and international authorities have showed an increasing awareness of flood and inundation hazard, likely due to the large floods which occurred in the past years in many regions of the world. In this context, the estimation of the design flood values to be adopted for flood risk assessment or floodplain management r...

A new simple two-step method to generate synthetic rainfall time series with spatial-temporal correlation assigned is proposed here. The first step consists in the generation of independent long stochastic rainfall time series in each rainfall station through the single-site Neyman-Scott Rectangular Pulses model. The second step is based on the app...

A large number of dams, built in Italy in the last century, were sized using limited and in some cases sparse hydrological data. As a result, the design flood values were affected by this drawback to which it has to be added a poor knowledge of flood formation processes and statistical techniques used for that. In recent years, sophisticated statis...

On 1st January 2006, during an ordinary flood event, a levee failure along the Foenna stream caused the flooding in the urban area of Sinalunga, a small town located in Tuscany region (Italy). The event was monitored by a public agency with the responsibility for the control and maintenance of the natural channel networks. Long time before of flood...

Several flood events brought river levees into the focus of attention for some disasters due to their collapse. This phenomena is quite complex to investigate, because of different factors that can affect the stability of levees, among them the non uniformity of material properties, which influencing the permeability of the embankment, might induce...

In recent years, the effects of flood damages have motivated the development of new complex methodologies for the simulation of the hydrologic/hydraulic behaviour of river systems, fundamental to direct the territorial planning as well as for the floodplain management and risk analysis. The valuation of the flood-prone areas can be carried out thro...