Research Projects, Ideas and Dreams

Research Projects

I am currently involved in the following research projects:

• CO₂2Water: "Stochastic amplification of climate change into floods and droughts change". The project is financed by the Italian Science Fund within the programme "Advanced Grant".  The grant amount is 1.383.631,00 €. 
  The news on the web site of the Ministry for University and Research (in Italian) describes the FIS programme, which finances fundamental research by adopting the model of the ERC. The web site als reports the list of the financed project. Here the list for the domain Physical Sciences and Engineering (PE).
  The research question addressed by the project are:

  1. Why, where and when changes in climate may lead to unexpected increases in flood and drought risk?

  2. What processes and factors lead to amplification of flood and drought risk?

  3. What framework of flood and drought risk amplification can be proposed that captures the above process interactions and enables the prediction of amplified flood and drought risk?

  For more details please see the web page of the project.
   

• Il progetto RISING è un programma strategico nazionale finanziato nell'ambito del PN RIC 2021–2027 (Programma Nazionale Ricerca, Innovazione e Competitività) e promosso dalla Fondazione RETURN in collaborazione con la Fondazione GRINS. 
  RISING si pone l'obiettivo di sviluppare una nuova infrastruttura digitale per la resilienza sociale e territoriale, con focus sulla gestione dei rischi ambientali. Coinvolge 21 partner di ricerca e istituzionali. Il mio ruolo è quello di coordinare le attività dell'Università di Bologna in relazione allo sviluppo di servizi climatici all'interno di un ecosistema digitale al servizio degli end users.
  The RISING project is a national strategic programme funded under PN RIC 2021–2027 (National Programme for Research, Innovation and Competitiveness) and promoted by the RETURN Foundation in collaboration with the GRINS Foundation. RISING aims to develop a new digital infrastructure for societal and territorial resilience, with a focus on environmental risk management. It brings together 21 research and institutional partners. My role is to coordinate the University of Bologna’s activities related to the development of climate services within a digital ecosystem designed to meet end users’ needs.

Research Ideas

Besides the funded research projects, I am currently working on the research ideas below. Part of time are side activities of the above projects, part of them are unfunded activities.

• Regionalisation of hydrological uncertainty for uncertainty assessment in ungauged locations;
• Modelling flood impacts through the investigation of the energy flow of floods. The idea is to identify critical hot spot for flood risk by assessing the intersection of the trajectories of people and highly energetic water flows;
• Improving our knowledge of frequency, intensity and duration of long term drought through paleoclimatic reconstruction and analysis of the climate drivers;
• Integration of physically-based and stochastic weather generation for predicting technically valid future weather scenarios under climate change. Technical validity implies that the scenarios can be used to support engineering design and therefore come along with uncertainty assessment;
• Uncertainty assessment for climate and weather scenarios based on validation of climate models with respect to historical statistics;
• The catchment area as a stochastic variable: closing the water balance for river catchments.

Research Dreams

I believe dreams are an essential ingredient of research activities. The benefit they deliver to a researcher's mind and therefore the scientific community is incommensurate, no matter if dreams eventually materialise or not. Dreaming matters more than making dreams come true. It is not easy to make a list of dreams. Here below please find an attempt:

• I dream to propose a unified stochastic theory for modelling the hydrological cycle as physics. My attempt to introduce the physically-based stochastic theory of hydrological modelling moves from this inspiration. See my published papers here, here and here.   
• I dream to identify with a physically-based approach the hotspots in a catchment for flood risk, so contributing to mitigate chance that we are taken by surprise. See my contribution here.
• I dream to make available to end users climate services providing technically valid approaches for extreme rainfall estimation under climate change. I have a couple of papers under review which I hope to link here soon.

If would like more details, please contact me. Thanks!

Last modified on October 19, 2026