Seismic signature of an extreme hydro-meteorological event in Italy

Abstract

Flash floods are a major threat for Mediterranean countries and their frequency is expected to increase in the next years due to the climatic change. Civil protection agencies are called to deal with increasing hydrological risk, but existing hydro-meteorological monitoring networks might not be enough for detecting, tracking, and characterizing rapidly evolving floods produced by severe convective storms. Nowadays, hydro-meteorological information in several watersheds particularly in small and mid-size in orographically complex regions or in third-world countries, is still not available or insufficient. To improve our observational capability of these events, we propose to exploit the seismic recordings, which act as opportunistic signals and can complement well-established procedures to early detect the occurrence of flash floods at regional scale. Here, we investigate the hydro-meteorological event that hit central Italy in September 2022 and resulted in a devastating flash flood. We compare seismic data from a national monitoring network with raingauges and hydrometer data. Our evidence suggests that the main stages of the hydro-meteorological events can be tracked by the spatio-temporal evolution of the seismic noise confirming the capability of this multi-sensor approach in detecting and characterizing such kind of events.