Preliminary long term changes in inter-annual precipitation variability in a Mediterranean region

Abstract

Precipitation trend analysis, on different spatial and temporal scales, has been of great concern during the past century because of the attention paid from the scientific community to global climate change. The IPCC reports confirm the increase of the surface temperature in the twentieth century and show a further increase for the twentyfirst century. Studies involving Italian long record databases show a strong reduction in rainfall, rather significantly over the last 50 years (Brunetti et al. 2006). More detailed analyses indicate negative trends at regional level in the Italian Mediterranean regions (Piccarreta et al. 2004; Longobardi and Villani 2010; Caloiero et al. 2011a). To date a moderate interest has been given by the scientific community to the inter-annual precipitation variability issue which seems however to lead to an overall increase (Giorgi and Lionello 2008; He and Gautam 2016).