Abstract
Abstract. Sicily, a major Mediterranean island, has experienced several exceptional precipitation episodes and floods during the last century, with serious damage to human life and the environment. Long-term, rational planning of urban development is indispensable to protect the population and to avoid huge economic losses in the future. This requires a thorough knowledge of the distributional features of extreme precipitation over the complex territory of Sicily. In this study, we perform a detailed investigation of observed 1 day precipitation extremes and their frequency distribution, based on a dense data set of high-quality, homogenized station records in 1921–2005. We estimate very high quantiles (return levels) corresponding to 10-, 50- and 100-year return periods, as predicted by a generalized extreme value distribution. Return level estimates are produced on a regular high-resolution grid (30 arcsec) using a variant of regional frequency analysis combined with regression techniques. Results clearly reflect the complexity of this region, and show the high vulnerability of its eastern and northeastern parts as those prone to the most intense and potentially damaging events.
Highlights
Sensitivity of the Mediterranean land areas to heavy precipitation and floods, and their responsiveness to climate change, is well documented
Before going into detail about the estimation of grid-point RLs, we briefly discuss a set of results from preliminary analyses aimed at screening data for their aptitude to be processed with RFA and a generalized extreme value (GEV) approach
Along with an overall agreement between records from neighbouring sites, a few critical cases were pointed out. These are due to exceptional events that truly appeared at one site only, and all sites with outstanding discrepancies were retained
Summary
Sensitivity of the Mediterranean land areas to heavy precipitation and floods, and their responsiveness to climate change, is well documented (see e.g. Luterbacher et al, 2006; Ulbrich et al, 2012). Due to the excessive exploitation of natural resources and soil, the exposure of the Mediterranean area to hydrometeorological hazards is supposed to increase in future scenarios (Giorgi and Lionello, 2008; Toreti et al, 2013), and requires in-depth research of present-day characteristics of precipitation extremes over this region. Since long time series of e.g. daily or sub-daily precipitation records are hardly available, in practice we often deal with rather small data samples. This complicates the application of EVT approaches, such as fitting a generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution to block data (e.g. annual maxima), and points to the need for efficient methods of parameters estimation with small samples (Martins and Stedinger, 2000)
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