Fine atmospheric particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major risk for public health, potentially leading to millions of premature deaths per year worldwide. The mechanisms and factors inducing PM2.5 toxicity are still not fully known and contrasting results are obtained when different acellular and cellular in vitro toxicity metrics are compared among themselves or with in vivo toxicity. This leads to major issues in air quality studies and pollution mitigation strategies: the detailed knowledge of the impact of PM2.5 sources on
health effects; the most performant metrics to represent toxicity, especially in urban areas where there are combined effects of several anthropogenic sources.
The aim of the TOX-IN-AIR project is threefold:
1) Investigate how acellular and intracellular toxicity indicators correlate one among the other and with the total and water soluble chemical composition putting in evidence seasonal and site dependencies.
2) Evaluate the contributions of the different natural and anthropogenic sources to the toxicological indicators and the nonlinear interactions among the sources and the toxicity metrics.
3) Develop new combined metrics to better represent the global...

Groundwater plays a key role in addressing global water needs. Around 20% of the world's aquifers are over-exploited, with outputs (withdrawal and natural discharge) exceeding recharge, resulting in resource depletion, storage loss in sandy layers and compaction of confining clay beds. The induced land subsidence causes direct/indirect impacts on urban landscapes (ground depressions, earth fissures, structure damages, increased flood risk, loss of land to water bodies) and economic loss, yet these are often overlooked, and so are considerations on how climate change, population and urban growth may further exacerbate them.
SubRISK+ will innovate in this field by providing new EO-derived products and tools aiming to: 1) enhance our understanding of subsidence and its impact; 2) empower the community to recognize the human-related  behavioral, socio-economic and demographic drivers of this geohazard and its cascading effects on urban environments and ecosystems; and 3) strengthen our ability to use consciously natural resources to make a step-change towards sustainable development.

Fire is an important ecosystem disturbance, having significant socio-economic consequences on the one hand, while fulfilling a vital ecological role on the other. Across fire-prone ecosystems, different fire regimes can be found, reflecting a combination of climatic factors and of different plant species characteristics. Ecosystem flammability and fuel load are the most evident and well-studied aspects of plant interactions with fire regimes. Only recently, has there been a major focus on how other plant traits, and especially fire responses, shape the fire regime. For example, invasive alien species with highly competitive traits, when introduced by humans into novel ranges, can have dramatic impact on the local fire regimes. The aim of this research is to determine the role that plant traits have in driving fire regimes in different ecosystems across the world and for various climates, including also the role played by invasive species.

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. Yet, a number of cyclones, i.e intense mid-latitude storms, caused precipitation extremes and considerable economic damage in Italy in the past decade. The extent that climate change has contributed to these events is poorly understood.
The overarching objective of ENCIRCLE is to provide credible, understandable and useful information of how climate change affects the frequency, intensity and duration of precipitation extremes driven by extratropical and Mediterranean cyclones in Italy.

Rainfall-related hazards are among the most damaging natural hazards, in Italy and globally. Risk management and societal
resilience to these hazards crucially depend on quantitative information on the probability of occurrence of extreme rainfall. The long historical rainfall records available from rain gauges allow us to derive these probabilities for the gauge locations, but suffer from important shortcomings: they hardly represent the multi-scale information required for hazard assessment, and they cannot adequately sample the spatial variability of extreme rainfall in areas with strong climatological gradients, such as orographic and coastal regions. Unfortunately, these are the areas where most rainfall-related hazards occur, especially in Italy. INTENSE will address these issues by combining observations from rain gauges, weather radars and satellites, state-of-the-art statistical approaches, stochastic weather generators, and physically-based models. With the increasing length of their records, weather radars and satellites have now become a realistic opportunity to overcome the observational limitations of rain gauges.

Convective events pose a serious hazard to societies due to their associated heavy rainfalls, large hail, strong winds, and lightning.
Location and timing determination of convective precipitation is still a challenge of modern meteorology. Despite the good skills of current weather forecasting tools in the prediction of the large-scale environment facilitating the onset of convective phenomena, the multitude of spatial scales involved in such events makes their characterization, observation and forecast a difficult task. The problem is further complicated by their rapid temporal development, which lasts from minutes to a few hours depending on the specific case.
Recent research indicates that the predictability of these events can be strongly improved accounting for local meteorological observations.
The goal of ICREN is to enhance the forecast of deep convective events by properly exploiting the information made available by local standard and non-conventional observations of meteorological variables through an ad hoc developed integrated forecasting model.

The Arctic is warming faster than other areas, with a double temperature increase compared to the global average (Arctic Amplification,AA). This affects climate on a large scale, perturbing meteorological parameters and hydrological cycles even at
Mid-latitudes, including Italy, in particular affecting extreme events.
Current models for climate change (CC) are highly limited by large uncertainties on the role of atmospheric aerosol, including the aerosol-radiation interactions in all sky conditions (depending on cloud type and cloudiness in the atmosphere) and on the climatic impact of different aerosol sources, including those emerging from the CC in the Arctic. Despite the vastness of the Arctic area, few monitoring stations are present and are on land, so no full description of the spatial variability of the needed parameters is available on the sea that covers most of the area. Finally, a detailed description of the aerosol spatial variability in the Arctic is not enough to investigate the aerosol effect on the AA: several modelling studies point to the possible role of the transport of heat due to aerosol absorption of solar radiation, from mid-latitudes to the Arctic.

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) have emerged as a global relevant driver for extreme hydrometeorological events and water budget modulator in many areas of the globe. Defined as narrow corridors of enhanced horizontal transport of moisture, ARs transfer huge amounts of water vapour from the tropics to the mid-latitudes. Low-latitude moisture export can be important for extreme events at
higher latitudes because it may cause critical precipitation thresholds for flooding to be exceeded. ARs have been studied in the last 20 years along the Pacific US Coast, being responsible for heavy precipitation originated by the interaction -up lift- with the coastal
orography. In the last decade, emerging regions such as Europe have been explored, where ARs have been connected to extreme events, especially those areas facing the Atlantic coast. The detection and investigation of ARs in the Mediterranean basin have started only in the very last years, so that the knowledge on this phenomenon is scarse. Only few studies showed the relevant role of
an AR in severe hydrometeorological events affecting the Mediterranean coast of Spain or the Italian peninsula.

During the Early Eocene, about 55 millions years ago, the climate of the Earth was characterized by radically different conditions than today: atmospheric CO2 exceeding 1000ppm, 10-15°C higher mean global surface temperature (GST) and strongly reduced pole-to-equator temperature gradient.
On top of this extraordinary mean state, the Earth was struck by a series of sudden global warming events, known as hyperthermals, which lasted a few millennia and saw further GST rise by as much as 5°C. They were entirely natural climatic events and were driven by an estimated 2000-5000 Gton carbon release into the atmosphere. Hyperthermals represent the fastest carbon release in the paleoclimatic records and our comprehension of their onset and decay is still partial, also because of the limited spatial and temporal frequency of proxy data.
A powerful tool to investigate hyperthermals - and Eocene climate in general - is represented by numerical Earth System Models (ESMs). Due to their capacity of filling gaps in proxy data and to the opportunity they provide for studying climate interactions under different mean states, ESMs are rapidly gaining ground for paleoclimatic applications.