Vincenzo Levizzani

On 2–3 October 2020, a heavy precipitation event severely affected northern Italy and in particular the western Alps, with rainfall amount exceeding 600 mm over 24 h. This event was associated with an upper-level trough over the western Mediterranean basin, a large-scale configuration typical of heavy precipitation phenomena on the southern side of...

On the evening of November 12, 2019, an exceptional high tide – the second‐highest in the ranking since sea‐level data have been recorded – hit the city of Venice in northern Italy and its entire lagoon, damaging a large part of its historical center. A small warm‐core mesoscale cyclone, which formed in the central Adriatic Sea and intensified duri...

A new method for studying hailstorms from space offers more consistent and more complete views of how and where hail forms, and how climate change might influence hail’s impacts in the future

Precipitation frequency analysis based on satellite products is still limited by estimation errors and by the use of statistical methods inadequate for these products. However, when it comes to poorly gauged areas of the world, satellite products can be a vital source of information. We present here a new method to derive satellite-based estimates...

The Po Valley in northern Italy is a hotspot for tornadoes in Europe in spite of being surrounded by two mountain ridges: the Alps in the north and the Apennines in the southwest. The research focuses on the case study of 19 September 2021, when seven tornadoes (four of them rated as F2) developed in the Po Valley in a few hours. The event was anal...

Accurate estimation of precipitation at the global scale is of utmost importance. Even though satellite and reanalysis products are capable of providing high spatial-temporal resolution estimations at the global level, they are associated with significant uncertainties that vary with regional characteristics and scales. The uncertainties among prec...

Osservare le nuvole in giro per i cieli di tutto il mondo è un’avventura entusiasmante: le nuvole cambiano aspetto, hanno nomi diversi, assumono le forme più strane, accompagnandoci ovunque andiamo o speriamo di arrivare. Per orientarsi nelle sterminate geografie celesti, però, una guida risulta indispensabile: ed è per questo motivo che Vincenzo L...

Satellite rainfall estimation review chapter

The impacts of hailstorms on human beings and structures and the associated high economic costs have raised significant interest in studying storm mechanisms and climatology, thus producing a substantial amount of literature in the field. To contribute to this effort, we have explored the hail frequency in the Mediterranean basin during the last tw...

Extreme precipitation heavily affects society and economy in Africa because it triggers natural hazards and contributes large amounts of freshwater. Understanding past changes in extreme precipitation could help us improve our projections of extremes, thus reducing the vulnerability of the region to climate change. Here, we combine high-resolution...

Snow plays a crucial role in the hydrological cycle and energy budget of the Earth, and remote sensing instruments with the necessary spatial coverage, resolution, and temporal sampling are essential for snowfall monitoring. Among such instruments, ground-radars have scanning capability and a resolution that make it possible to obtain a 3D structur...

During recent decades East Africa (EA) and Southern Africa (SA) have experienced an intensification of hydrological hazards, such as floods and droughts, which have dramatically affected the population, making these areas two of the regions of the African continent most vulnerable to these hazards. Thus, precipitation monitoring and the evaluation...

This report reviews the current state of precipitation products, and includes assessments of sub-daily global satellite precipitation products, discussions of various climate applications of precipitation products, and deliberations on emerging directions and the future of precipitation products.

As of 2020, climate models include traditional Global Circulation/Climate Models (GCMs), Regional Climate Models (RCMs) and, more recently, Earth System Models (ESMs). All these models are different from Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models in that they are intended to provide estimates of the climate rather than meteorological forecasts: they...

Presi come siamo dalle nostre attività quotidiane, il nostro sguardo è sempre più diretto verso il basso, puntato sullo schermo di un cellulare o di un computer, fisso sulla strada che stiamo percorrendo, diretto ai fornelli della nostra cucina. Chi di noi ha la «testa fra le nuvole» è di solito un distratto o uno svampito, addirittura un perdigior...

Two tropical‐like cyclones in the Mediterranean Sea, aka medicanes, are analysed herein by means of numerical simulations. The cyclones, which were recently investigated in Miglietta and Rotunno, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2019, 145, are reconsidered in the present study, in which we focus on their respective preconditio...

A new method for detecting hailstorms by using all the MHS-like (MHS, Microwave Humidity Sounder) satellite radiometers currently in orbit is presented. A probability-based model originally designed for AMSU-B/MHS-based (AMSU-B, Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-B) radiometers has been fitted to the observations of all microwave radiometers onboard...

The Mediterranean storm “Vaia” developed within a typical autumn synoptic circulation, generally associated with heavy rain conditions over the western Mediterranean basin. Intense precipitation was responsible for floods over Italy between 27-30 October 2018 and the storm was accompanied by explosive cyclogenesis, storm surge and extremely intense...

Precipitation exhibits a large variability over a wide range of space and time scales: from seconds to years and decades in time and from the millimeter scale of microphysical processes to regional and global scales in space. It also exhibits a large variability in magnitude and frequency, from low extremes resulting in prolonged droughts to high e...

This book offers a complete overview of the measurement of precipitation from space, which has made considerable advancements during the last two decades. This is mainly due to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, CloudSat and a carefully maintained constellation of satellites hosting p...

The Africa Rainfall Climatology v2 (ARC2), Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) v2, and Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite (TAMSAT) African Rainfall Climatology And Time Series v3 (TARCAT3) satellite rainfall products are exploited to study the spatial and temporal variability of East Africa (EA) rai...

We undertook a comprehensive evaluation of 22 gridded (quasi-)global (sub-)daily precipitation (P) datasets for the period 2000–2016. Thirteen non-gauge-corrected P datasets were evaluated using daily P gauge observations from 76,086 gauges worldwide. Another nine gauge-corrected datasets were evaluated using hydrological modeling, by calibrating t...

This chapter speculates on the future, and as such, is highly uncertain given the fluid nature with which specific satellite missions are selected and deselected as budgets fluctuate and priorities are modified to suit political expediencies. To reduce some of this uncertainty, the chapter focuses instead on the evolving needs from an application a...

This book offers a complete overview of the measurement of precipitation from space, which has made considerable advancements during the last two decades. This is mainly due to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, CloudSat and a carefully maintained constellation of satellites hosting p...

Passive microwave measurements from satellites have been used to identify the signature of hail in intense thunderstorms. The scattering signal of hailstones is typically observed as a strong depression of upwelling brightness temperatures from the cloud to the satellite. Although the relation between scattering signal and hail diameter is often as...

The influence of the large-scale atmospheric circulation on winter precipitation over the Mediterranean region is studied with the use of monthly 2.5° × 2.5° ERA-Interim 500 and 1000 hPa geopotential heights and GPCP-v2.3 precipitation, for the period 1980–2017. At first, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied both to geopotential heights an...

The water cycle is the most essential supporting physical mechanism ensuring the existence of life on Earth. Its components encompass the atmosphere, land, and oceans. The cycle is composed of evaporation, evapotranspiration, sublimation, water vapor transport, condensation, precipitation, runoff, infiltration and percolation, groundwater flow, and...

The ARC v2 (Novella and Thiaw 2013), CHIRPS v2 (Funk et al. 2015) , and TARCAT v3 (Maidment et al. 2017) satellite rainfall products are exploited to identify the presence of significant rainfall trend patterns over East Africa (EA) in the period 1983-2017 through the time series of selected rainfall indices from the joint CCI/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert T...

The estimation of precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) derived from satellite sensors is now an integral part of monitoring the Earth system. The main advantage of using Earth observation datasets for precipitation estimation is the global perspective that satellites provide. Techniques using these data have exploited a range of satellite systems...

Retrievals of falling snow from space-based observations represent key inputs for understanding and linking Earth’s atmospheric, hydrological, and energy cycles. This work quantifies and investigates causes of differences among the first stable falling snow retrieval products from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory satellit...

The ARC v2 (Novella and Thiaw, 2013), CHIRPS v2 (Funk et al., 2015) , and TARCAT v3 (Maidment et al., 2017) satellite rainfall products are exploited to study the spatial and temporal variability of East Africa (EA) rainfall between 1983 and 2017 through the time series of selected rainfall indices from the joint CCI/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert Team on Cli...

The International Precipitation Working Group (IPWG) is a permanent International Science Working Group (ISWG) of the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS), co-sponsored by CGMS and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The IPWG provides a focal point and forum for the international scientific community to address the issue...

Rainfall from the October-November-December (OND) short rains season over East Africa (EA, 5S-20N, 28E-52E) were analysed during the 1983-2010 period using state-of-the-art observational datasets. Links among satellite-derived rainfall (Climate Hazards group InfraRed Rainfall with Station data, CHIRPS), sea surface temperature (Hadley Centre Sea ic...

Supplementary material for the journal article "East Africa Rainfall Trends and Variability 1983–2015 Using Three Long-Term Satellite Products" by Cattani et al., 2018

Daily time series from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Africa Rainfall Climatology version 2.0 (ARC2), Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) and Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite (TAMSAT) African Rainfall Climatology And Time series version 2 (TARCAT) high-resolution long-term satellite rainfall...

We undertook a comprehensive evaluation of 22 gridded (quasi-)global (sub-)daily precipitation (P) datasets for the period 2000–2016. Thirteen non-gauge-corrected P datasets were evaluated using daily P gauge observations from 76 086 gauges worldwide. Another nine gauge-corrected datasets were evaluated using hydrological modeling, by calibrating t...

The advent of global precipitation data sets with increasing temporal span has made it possible to use them for validating climate models. In order to fulfill the requirement of global coverage, existing products integrate satellite-derived retrievals from many sensors with direct ground observations (gauges, disdrometers, radars), which are used a...

Riassunto Le nubi sono state per lungo tempo fenomeni atmosferici studiati da una ristretta cerchia di specialisti, i fisici delle nubi, che hanno esplorato i fenomeni di condensazione, nucleazione, collisione-coalescenza, aggregazione, break-up, crescita per diffusione, presenza dell " acqua sopraffusa e, in generale, tutto ciò che ha a che vedere...

The potential vorticity (PV) anomalies due to the intrusion of dry stratospheric air and those generated by the tropospheric diabatic latent heating are qualitatively analyzed for five Mediterranean tropical-like cyclones (also known as Medicanes or TLCs). Model simulations show the presence of an upper level PV streamer in the early stages of the...

Current global precipitation (P) datasets do not take full advantage of the complementary nature of satellite and reanalysis data. Here, we present Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) version 1.1, a global P dataset for the period 1979–2015 with a 3-hourly temporal and 0.25∘ spatial resolution, specifically designed for hydrologica...

The precipitation regime over the Mediterranean basin is investigated for the period 1979–2010 using monthly mean satellite data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCPv2). The results show that a clear contrast exists between the more rainy northern part of the study region (Southern Europe) and the drier southern area (North Afric...

Monthly mean satellite data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCPv2) are used to examine the year-by-year variability of precipitation over the Mediterranean Basin and its changes over the period 1979–2010. The results show that the mean annual precipitation averaged over the study area has slightly increased from 1979 to 2010 by...

East Africa (EA, 5°S–20°N, 28°E–52°E) is experiencing an extreme interannual variability of its rainfall regime with economic and societal consequences on a population that mainly sustains on rain-fed agriculture. The complexity of the rainfall regime is the result of the overlap of factors ranging from large-scale tropical drivers (including sever...

East Africa experienced in the 2001 -2011 time period some of the worst drought events to date culminating in the high-impact drought of 2010-2011. Long-term monitoring of precipitation is thus essential and satellite-based precipitation products can help in coping with the relatively sparse rain-gauge ground networks of this area of the world. How...

Estimating space-time variability of precipitation is an important task in East Africa, considering the observed increased frequency of extreme events, drought episodes in particular. These events deeply affect the population with implications on agriculture and consequently food security. Daily accumulated precipitation time series from satellite...

Over the last 15 years the constellation of satellites carrying passive microwave (PMW) sensors has grown to a mature collection of almost a dozen satellites at any given time. Increasingly, a broad range of science and user communities have come to depend on the quasi-global precipitation analyses that intercalibrate and merge these individual PMW...

The proposed work aims to enhance the capabilities of the passive microwave measurements on board NOAA and MetOp satellites for snowfall identification. Two independent methods based on the same sensors (AMSU/MHS) were applied and qualitatively inter-compared during snowstorms over Europe by using the NIMROD radar network as ground truth. The first...

The daily accumulated precipitation from two widely used satellite products, the Africa Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC2) and TRMM-Multi Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) 3B42 version 7, are exploited to extract the spatial variability and temporal evolution of precipitation over East Africa (EA, - 5°S–20°N, 28°E–52°E) at 0.25° spatial resolution d...

Precipitation science is becoming a thriving multidisciplinary area as a special interest topic for meteorology, climatology, hydrology, remote sensing, and computing science. This is not surprising since precipitation features a key component of many human activities, most notably agriculture and water resources management, making rain estimation...

CONCLUSIONES Se ha implementado en el Centro Espacial Nacional de Argentina la técnica 183-WSL (Laviola y Levizzani, 2009 y 2011) basada en 5 canales de microondas. Actualmente se obtienen mapas de intensidad de precipitación en tiempo diferido a partir de la ingesta de datos en dicho Centro. Se prevé poner el sistema en forma totalmente automatiza...

During previous decades, rela2onships between many geophysical variables and the radiometric measurements in the microwave bands were translated into a number of satellite-­‐based algorithms. Recently, several studies have revealed a high correla2on between the occurrence of hail and the microwave brightness temperature depression in convec2ve clou...

East Africa experienced in the 2001 -2011 time period some of the worst drought events to date, culminated with the high-impact drought in 2010-2011. The frequency and impacts of these extreme events require a continuous monitoring of precipitation, as a key variable for the inclusion of these phenomena in regional climatological studies and their...

Comparison of global scale monthly rainfall totals obtained from the application of SM2RAIN to ASCAT soil moisture data and the GPCP (Global Precipitation Climatology Project) product in the period 2007-2010.

East Africa experienced in the 2001 -2011 time period some of the worst drought events to date, culminated with the high-impact drought in 2010-2011. The frequency and impacts of these extreme events require a continuous monitoring of precipitation, as a key variable for the inclusion of these phenomena in regional climatological studies and their...

POSTER at the conference: Satellite soil moisture validation & application workshop, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 10 - 11 July 2014 http://www.hydrology-amsterdam.nl/SoilMoistureWS_Adam14/Home.html Accurate estimates of rainfall are of vital importance for mitigation strategies of natural hazards such as floods and landslides as well as for disease...

Measuring precipitation intensity is not straightforward and over many areas, ground observations are lacking and satellite observations are used to fill this gap. The most common way of retrieving rainfall is by addressing the problem " top-down" by inverting the atmospheric signals reflected or radiated by atmospheric hydrometeors. However, most...

A method that allows researchers to estimate global rainfall levels using soil-moisture data could help to improve hazard planning for floods and landslides.

Three new global rainfall products obtained from satellite soil moisture data through the SM2RAIN algorithm have been delivered (Brocca et al., 2014; JGR http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2014JD021489). Rainfall data (mm/day) have daily temporal resolution, 1-degree spatial resolution and are available for the period 2007-2012. For the interested user, som...

Identifying deep convection is of paramount importance, as it may be associated with extreme weather that has significant impact on the environment, property and the population. A new method, the Hail Detection Tool (HDT), is described for identifying hail-bearing storms using multi-spectral Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data. HDT was conceived...