Environmental Engineering

FRANCESCO CIOFFI

The course will provide fundamentals about theoretical, technical and practical issues in : a) Modeling the link between local precipitation regime and large-scale atmospheric circulation features, with a specific focus to extreme hydrological events as rainfall/flood and drought events; b) impact assessment of hydrological changes at local scale due to global warming; c) identifying technical solutions to cope such impacts on social, economical and environmental systems.

Analysis and solution capabilities relevant to the problems of design, implementation and operation of
climate/hydrological/hydraulic models with particular regard to the analysis of the interaction between the
different spatial and temporal scales of the involved phenomena, from the planetary scale of atmospheric
circulation to the basin scale or to the typical hydraulic scales of water bodies. Gain a solid knowledge about the
problems in data analysis and modelling, design and implementation of modelling systems for application at
regional or basin scale.

Knowledge of the fundamentals of mathematical analysis, physics, chemistry and fluid mechanics.

Introduction to climate models. Non‐linearity, chaoticness and feedbacks in the climate system. Global and
Regional atmospheric circulation models. Performance and drawbacks in representing the hydrological cycle.
Atmospheric rivers and humidity transport. Bias and bias correction. Global warming scenarios. Uncertainty in
climate projections. Ensemble models.
Statistical and dynamical rainfall downscaling models. Hidden Markov Model and Non‐homogeneous
Hidden Markov Model for daily rainfall amount and occurrence downscaling. Selection of atmospheric predictors
and data reduction methods. Criteria to assess the model performance and climate projections.
Extreme hydrological events: floods and droughts. Modelling the link between extreme hydrological events
and large scale atmospheric circulation features. Complex Networks, Event Synchronization and Self‐Organized
Map.
Forecasting and projections. Criteria to perform early‐warning and seasonal forecasts, as well as, climate
projections of intensity and occurrence of hydrological extremes at local scale by using large scale atmospheric
circulation simulations from reanalysis and future projections from climate change scenarios.
Assessment of the impact of hydrological extreme at basin and/or regional scale. Rainfall‐runoff
hydrological models. Hydraulic models. Criteria and methods for the assessment of hydraulic risk due to floods
and droughts. Optimization models for decision support to plan risk reduction by flooding and water
management.
Application to real‐world engineering problems by using the chain of climate/hydrological/hydraulic models.

Materials and articles provided by the teacher

Preparation of an applied research project and discussion on topics relevant to the course.