Extreme storm rainfall and climatic change

Burlando, P. and Rosso, R., 1991. Extreme storm rainfall and climatic change. Atmos. Res., 27: 169 189. In recent years General Circulation Models (GCMs) have been widely developed in the attempt to simulate global climate, and to predict future climate scenarios under conditions of enhanced CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, these models provide estimates of he hydrological balance, which are integrated over a very coarse spatial computing grid. Significance and usefulness of such estimates are then limited with respect to the needs of water resources analyses at the basin scale. Accordingly, in this paper, coupling of GCMs' results and hydrology modeling is tackled, by investigating the precipitation process. A theoretical approach for linking modified scenarios simulated by GCMs to local changes in the precipitation patterns under global change is proposed. A stochastic model based on the theory of point process is used to describe the temporal process of precipitation jointly with scaling properties of rainfall, for the purpose of linking analytically changes predicted by GCMs to local modifications of the precipitation patterns under the global change. A sensitivity analysis of the proposed approach is also reported, jointly with an application to real-world data, in order to assess the validity of the procedure, and to address some implications of the global change on the precipitation process.