Throughout history, the city of Rome has experienced numerous flooding events from the Tiber river. Ancient Rome mostly developed on the hills, while the Tiber’s floodplain was mainly used for agricultural purposes. Instead, many people live nowadays in modern districts in the Tiber’s floodplain, often unaware of their exposure to potentially flooding. This research work aims to explore the dynamics of changing flood risk between these two opposite pictures of ancient and contemporary Rome.

A Monte Carlo approach for deriving flood frequency curves in ungauged basins in Sicily region (Italy) is proposed. The procedure consists of: (i) a regional frequency analysis of extreme rainfall series, combined with Huff curves-based synthetic hyetographs, for design storms and (ii) a rainfall-runoff model, based on the Time-Area technique, to generate synthetic hydrographs. Validation of the procedure is carried out on four gauged river basins in Sicily (Italy) with promising results.

Probabilistic flood inundation mapping at ungauged streams due to roughness coefficient uncertainty in hydraulic modelling. The results of this study show that the proposed procedure supports probabilistic flood hazard mapping at ungauged rivers and provides water resources managers with valuable information for planning and implementing flood risk mitigation strategies.

The extreme temperature events, the heat and cold waves, besides to have a significant impact on human health and activities, have negative influences also on mountain ecosystems. This work provides a characterization of heat and cold waves variability and trends in high-elevation sites of Central Mediterranean area, by using the long-term temperature time series collected in Montevergine. Main results highlight a positive trend in heat waves frequency and severity in the last 40 years.

For early warning of disasters induced by precipitation (such as floods and landslides), different kinds of rainfall thresholds are adopted, which vary from each other, on the basis on adopted hypotheses. This work briefly discusses different schemes of rainfall thresholds, focusing attention on landslide prediction, with some applications to a real case study in Calabria region (southern Italy).

The paper presents the flood and landslide early warning system HEWS developed by the University of Messina for the Integrated Multi-Risk Decentralised Functional Centre of Sicily (Italy). HEWS implements a methodology based on the combined use of rainfall thresholds, soil moisture modelling and quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF) to issue alert bulletins both for floods and landslide. The software Delft-FEWS has been adopted as operation platform to support the implementation of HEWS.

This research aims at improving hydrological modelling skills of flash flood prediction by exploiting earth observation data. To this aim, high spatial/moderate temporal resolution soil moisture maps, derived from Sentinel 1 acquisitions, were used in a data assimilation framework. Findings revealed the potential of Sentinel 1-based soil moisture data assimilation for flash flood risk reduction and improved our understanding of the capabilities of the aforementioned satellite-derived product.

This work presents a methodological approach to perform the comparative analysis of 2 events affecting the Calabria region (southern Italy), by collecting all the qualitative and quantitative features useful to describe both rain and damage. The first event occurred between 8 and 10 September 2000 while the second event occurred between 30 October and 1 November 2015. We concluded that, in the 2015 event, the management of pre-event phases allowed to reduce the number of victims.