In the last fifty years, drought conditions have increased in Southern Europe as a consequence of ongoing climate change. Also in Northern Italy, increasingly large areas are affected more frequently by droughts, generating an aggravation of negative impacts on natural, agricultural and socio-economic systems.
Recently, the University of Turin and the Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources of the National Research Council analyzed the characteristics of droughts in Northern Italy. The main drought events were identified in terms of duration, intensity and percentage of area involved in the current period (1965-2017) and in projections for the immediate future (2021-2050) and the distant future (2071-2100).
Data show that between 1965 and 2017 nine major drought events occurred in Northern Italy, but only since the winter of 1983 have episodes with a duration of at least 15 weeks been recorded. With the beginning of the 2000s the events became even more frequent and extended; among the most relevant we find the episodes of 2003 (35 weeks and 58% of area affected), 2012 (47 weeks and an extension up to 75% of area affected) and 2017 (34 weeks and 46% of total area affected by drought).
The drivers of these drought episodes are related to several mechanisms, which have changed over the years.
Read the full article by Alice Baronetti and Antonello Provenzale (CNR-IGG) and published on Rinnovabili.it.