Francesco Cavalleri, CNR-ISAC

15/04/2026 – 11:00

CNR-ISAC, Bologna meeting room and online   

Abstract

The increasing impacts of extreme weather events, amplified by climate change, make it increasingly necessary to have reliable tools to analyze and reconstruct past atmospheric conditions. In this context, meteorological reanalyses — which combine observations and numerical models — are a fundamental resource, as they provide consistent gridded datasets with typically hourly temporal resolution over several decades. These products find applications across many fields, from climate research to energy planning, from water resource management to risk assessment related to extreme events. In recent years, a wide range of regional reanalyses for Italy has been produced through dynamical downscaling by various research institutes, including CMCC, RSE, ARPAE, and CIMA. More recently, the MORE reanalysis was developed at ISAC-CNR, based on the MOLOCH model, which currently represents one of the highest-resolution datasets available for Italy (about 1.7 km) and covers the period 1990–2024 with annual updates.Despite their high scientific and practical value, all reanalyses inevitably have limitations and uncertainties. For this reason, my doctoral work focused on the validation of temperature [1] and precipitation [2] fields from several reanalyses available for Italy, comparing them with each other and with observational data, and developing new evaluation methods capable of accounting for different spatial and temporal scales as well as differences in orography representation between models and observations. In the presentation, I will show the results of these validations, highlighting which products are most suitable for applications at different spatial and temporal scales, across seasons and regions. I will also present some climate applications, such as the analysis of tropical nights, and how reanalyses can be used to investigate hourly precipitation extremes [3] and their long-term evolution.

[1] Cavalleri, F., et al. (2024). Inter-comparison and validation of high-resolution surface air temperature reanalysis fields over Italy. International Journal of Climatology, 44(8), 2681–2700. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.8475
[2] Cavalleri, F., et al. (2024). Multi-scale assessment of high-resolution reanalyses precipitation fields over Italy. Atmospheric Research, 312, 107734. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2024.107734
[3] Cavalleri, F., et al. (2026), Hourly Precipitation Patterns and Extremization over Italy using convection-permitting reanalysis data, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 26, 279–297, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-279-2026

Bio
After completing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Physics at the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, I earned a PhD in Environmental Sciences at the Università degli Studi di Milano, conducted in collaboration with Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico (RSE) and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. I am currently working as a research fellow at the Istituto di Scienze dell’Atmosfera e del Clima of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. My research has focused primarily on the analysis and validation of high-resolution meteorological reanalyses, with particular attention to the representation of temperature, precipitation, and extreme events across Italy.

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