Abstract
Climate change is affecting all regions worldwide. Globally, polar ice shields are melting and the sea is rising. Moreover, some regions are facing more common extreme weather events and rainfall, while others are experiencing more extreme heat waves and droughts, causing changes in mean renewable water supplies e.g., precipitation and runoff. In this work, in order to detect possible rainfall trends in the Calabria region (southern Italy), a gridded database has been obtained from a rainfall data set of 129 monthly series collected for the period 1951–2016. In particular, the Inverse Distance Weighed was applied to build 603 rainfall grid series with a spatial resolution of 5 km × 5 km and, for each grid point, the monthly, seasonal and annual rainfall series were analyzed with the Mann–Kendall non-parametric test and the Theil–Sen estimator. Results showed a decreasing trend for the annual and winter–autumn rainfall and an increasing trend for the summer one.
Highlights
Climate in the Mediterranean is influenced by the arid North African currents and by Central Europe’s temperate, humid ones
The database of 603 monthly rainfall grid series with a spatial resolution of 5 km × 5 km has been obtained by means of the Inverse Distance Weighed (IDW) that is based on the algorithm of [26,27]
The negative trend has been detected throughout the entire region but, in the northwestern side, where magnitudes lower than −50 mm/10 years have been evaluated in several grid points (Figure 2b)
Summary
Climate in the Mediterranean is influenced by the arid North African currents and by Central Europe’s temperate, humid ones. A large number of studies revealed a negative trend of yearly total and average precipitation in the Mediterranean basin and an increase in drought events, especially since the second half of the past century [7]. Various studies carried out on both regional and local scales [11,12] have shown an increase in the frequency of extreme rainfall and temperature events such as heat waves, floods, droughts. An increase in dry days, associated with a positive trend in rainfall intensity, has been evidenced in areas characterized by Mediterranean climate by Polade et al [13]: this means that where dry periods are longer, extreme rainfall events could be more frequent
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