My research is focused on understanding the impact of human-caused climate change on the hydroclimate, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of global warming on extreme events (e.g., droughts, extreme precipitation, heat waves) in Mediterranean and monsoonal climates.
Some examples of my recent research are:
1) Droughts. I am investigating multi-year droughts (as, for example, the recent 2021-2023 drought in Italy) which impacted Italy in the last century, identifying their atmospheric drivers. Multi-year droughts pose a serious threat to water resources security as they stress the resilience of hydrological, ecological and socioeconomic systems to their limits. Key research questions are: will these events be more frequent under global warming? Will the atmospheric dynamics which control their change, or they will just be exacerbated by warmer conditions?
2) Extreme precipitation. An increase in precipitation extremes is one of the most robust aspects of anthropogenic climate change, but not in the Mediterranean region, where the confidence on the effects of climate change remains low. Italy, in particular, features unclear trends in the intensity of precipitation extremes, with spatially and seasonally dependent signals. I am currently involved in the research project ENCIRCLE (link to project webpage), which focuses on better understanding the dynamic and thermodynamic conditions associated with extreme precipitation over Italy and the Mediterranean and how they are affected by climate change, using observations, statistical techniques, machine learning (e.g., self-organizing maps) and modeling.
3) Heat waves. Extreme temperatures, dangerous to human health, are typically experience during summer heatwaves, when particular synoptic conditions favor the rise of temperature for prolonged time periods. I am investigating the role of atmospheric circulation and global warming in the major European heat waves occurred in the last decades and how global warming may affect them in the coming decades.
