Istituto di Scienze dell'Atmosfera e del Clima
Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate




Climate Monitoring for Italy

Monitoring and assessment of the state of the Italian climate: monthly climate bulletins showing the state of the Italian climate and ranking of the latest monthly/seasonal/annual anomaly within the context of the last two centuries of climate variability.

(Michele Brunetti)


Creative Commons License
This work by CNR-ISAC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 
FOR HIGH RESOLUTION ANALYSIS CLICK HERE

Latest Month Latest Season Latest Year Year-to-date Drought/Wetness Monitoring Long-Term Analysis Info



Latest Month Analysis


FEBRUARY 2024
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature

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Latest Season Analysis


(Winter:DJF; Spring:MAM; Summer:JJA; Autumn:SON)
WINTER 2024
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature

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Latest Year Analysis


Meteorological Year
(Annual values correspond to the period from December to November)
2023
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature
Solar Year
(Annual values correspond to the period from January to December)
2023
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature

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Year-to-date Analysis


Meteorological Year
(Annual values correspond to the period from December to November)
DECEMBER - FEBRUARY 2024
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature
Solar Year
(Annual values correspond to the period from January to December)
JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2024
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature

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Drought/Wetness Monitoring

Comparison of the cumulated precipitation along the current year with the climatological cumulated values (reference period 1991-2020)

METEOROLOGICAL YEAR
2024
(December to November)
Northern Italy
Italy
Southern Italy
HYDROLOGICAL YEAR
2024
(October to September)
Northern Italy
Italy
Southern Italy
SOLAR YEAR
2024
(January to December)
Northern Italy
Italy
Southern Italy

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Long-Term Analysis



Italian Mean Temperature and Precipitation Series
(deviation from the 1991-2020 mean)


METEOROLOGICAL YEAR
(December to November)
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
PRECIPITATION ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature


SOLAR YEAR
(January to December)
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
PRECIPITATION ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature


WINTER
(DJF)
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
PRECIPITATION ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature


SPRING
(MAM)
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
PRECIPITATION ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature


SUMMER
(JJA)
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
PRECIPITATION ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature


AUTUMN
(SON)
TEMPERATURE ANOMALY
PRECIPITATION ANOMALY
Minimum Temperature
Mean Temperature
Maximum Temperature

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THE DATA SET

The data used to produce the climate bulletins consists of a data set of secular records, coming from the historical Italian Meteorological Observatories, set up in Brunetti et al (2006) updated with data from the Global Surface Summery of Day (GSOD), which comprises Italian Air Force and ENAV station data.
At present day, many of the historical Italian Meteorological Observatories are closed and for those still working it is difficult to obtain data in an automatic and near real time way. For this reason, the historical Observatories records, when possible, were merged with the modern Air Force network to get a series wich is updatable in near real time and automatically via GSOD Network managed by NCDC/NOAA.
The whole data set (both merged and not merged series) has been homogenized with statistical techniques to eliminate all the non-climatic signals due to station history (changes in the instruments, instruments/station relocation, changes in the observations riles, and so on). See Brunetti et al. (2006) for details about data homogenization and Venema et al. (2012) for details about the performances of the mostly used homogenization techniques.
The homogenization is a necessary step to provide time series with a long-term signal as close as possible to the real climate signal.
The figures show the data set with different symbols for stations wich are updated in near real time and stations not updated.
CONVERSION INTO ANOMALIES
Stations are located at different elevations and absolute temperature and precipitation values present strong spatial gradients. For this reason, changes in data availability can lead to biases when averaging among station series of different length.
An example: if we average the temperature records of three stations with different mean temperature values (e.g. one station located at sea leve, one at 1000m asl and the third one at 2000m asl) and with station records having different lengths, the resulting average series will be positively biased when the coldest station has no data and negatively biased when the warmest station has no data.
To avoid biases that could result from these problems, monthly temperature and precipitation series are reduced to anomalies (deviation from the mean for temperature and ratio for precipitation) from the period with best coverage (1991-2020).
Because many stations do not have complete records for the 1991-2020 period, a gap-filling technique have been developed to estimate 1991-2020 averages from neighbouring records (see Brunetti et al., 2006).
The station records converted into anomalies are then interpolated onto a regular grid.
GRIDDING METHOD
The grid has one degree resolution, both in latitude and in longitude, and was realised with an interpolation technique based on a radial weight and an angular term.
The radial term was realised with a gaussian weighting function with the following form:

with

where i runs along the stations and is the distance between the station i and the grid point (x,y). With this choice of the c parameter, we have weights of 0.5 for station distances equal to 1/4 from the grid point we want to calculate.
is defined as the mean distance of one grid point from its next one obtained by increasing both longitude and latitude by one grid step (it is a sort of mean length of the grid mesh diagonal).
For a grid resolution of 1 deg (as in this case) the parameter is about 130 km.
The angular term accounts for the geographical separation among the sites with available time series. It has the following form:

where is the angular separation of stations i and l with the vertex of the angle defined at grid point (x,y).
The final weight is the product of the radial and the angular terms.
Each grid point was calculated under one of the following conditions: i) a minimum of two stations at a distance lower than , or ii) a minimum of one station at a distance lower than . The grid value computation (once the above conditions were satisfied) was then performed by considering all stations within a distance of .
THE NATIONAL MEAN SERIES
The national mean seires were obtained by averaging all grid boxes over the italian territory and not the station anomalies.
The reason is as follows:
The availability of station data is typically not sufficient to ensure an even distribution of stations throughout a network. But by averaging station anomalies within regions of similar size (grid boxes) and then calculating the average of all the grid box averages, a more representative region-wide anomaly can be calculated.
This makes grid box averaging superior to simply taking the average of all stations in the domain. A network of 1000 stations could theoretically have 700 stations in the northern half of the domain and 300 stations in the southern half. A simple average of the stations could easily create a bias in the domain-wide average to those stations in the north.
REFERENCES
M. Brunetti, M. Maugeri, F. Monti, T. Nanni; 2006. Temperature and precipitation variability in Italy in the last two centuries from homogenized instrumental time series. International Journal of Climatology, 26, 345-381.
Venema V. K. C., O. Mestre, E. Aguilar, I. Auer, J. A. Guijarro, P. Domonkos, G. Vertacnik, T. Szentimrey, P. Stepanek, P. Zahradnicek, J. Viarre, G. Müller-Westermeier, M. Lakatos, C. N. Williams, M. J. Menne, R. Lindau, D. Rasol, E. Rustemeier, K. Kolokythas, T. Marinova, L. Andresen, F. Acquaotta, S. Fratianni, S. Cheval, M. Klancar, M. Brunetti, C. Gruber, M. Prohom Duran, T. Likso, P. Esteban, and T. Brandsma; 2012. Benchmarking homogenization algorithms for monthly data. Climate of the Past, 8, 89-115, doi:10.5194/cp-8-89-2012.




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