Global warming severely affects Alpine hydrology, especially impacting winter storage and slow release of water from snow/ice melt during spring/summer. Changes in water availability and seasonality affect hydropower production, which in Italy has a fundamental role in the energy sector. In fact, not only water provides a large share of the energy production, but back pumping of water and repeated exploitation provide large energy storage, hardly feasible with other means.
Within this context, the project CCHP-ALPS - Climate Change and HydroPower in the Alps aims at assessing the impact of past and projected climate change upon hydropower potential of the Po river catchment, which gathers a large share of water from the Southern Alps.
We will investigate a "long-term" period, from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 21st one, i.e. more than 120 years of observations and in the future several decades of projections. First, we will setup 30-arc-second-resolution daily minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation fields for the entire investigated region.