Hydrological Extremes and Human Societies

This presentation is part of the summer school “Hydrometeorological extremes: processes, models and human impacts”  just held at Cagliari University this July 12-16. It is a school well organised by Roberto Deidda and became over the year a standard appointment fo my Ph.D. students. This year, among the lecturer there was Giuliano di Baldassarre (GS, RG) who covered the topic on Hydrological Extremes and Human Societies. Unfortunately I could not have been present at his lecture, but I've got his slides (and the permission to publish them).  You can find them below, by clicking on the figure. 

He also suggested some readings related to the talk:

Bianchizza, C., & Frigerio, S. (2013). Domination of or Adaptation to Nature ? A lesson we can still learn from the Vajont. Italian Journal of Engineering Geology and Environment, 6, 523–530. http://doi.org/10.4408/IJEGE.2013-06.B-50

Delle Rose, M. (2012). Decision-making errors and socio-political disputes over the Vajont dam disaster. Disaster Advances, 5(3), 144–152.

Di Baldassarre, G., Martinez, F., Kalantari, Z., & Viglione, A. (2017). Drought and flood in the Anthropocene: feedback mechanisms in reservoir operation. Earth System Dynamics, 8(1), 225–233. http://doi.org/10.5194/esd-8-225-2017

Di Baldassarre, G., Viglione, A., Carr, G., Kuil, L., Yan, K., Brandimarte, L., & Blöschl, G. (2015). Debates-Perspectives on socio-hydrology: Capturing feedbacks between physical and social processes. Water Resources Research, 51(6), 4770–4781. http://doi.org/10.1002/2014WR016416

Montanari, A., Young, G., Savenije, H. H. G., Hughes, D., Wagener, T., Ren, L. L., et al. (2013). “Panta Rhei—Everything Flows”: Change in hydrology and society—The IAHS Scientific Decade 2013–2022. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 58(6), 1256–1275. http://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2013.809088

Extreme Rainfall Distribution Estimation with Python (as a scripting language)

This post collects the Notebook used in my classes of Hydraulic Constructions and Hydrology for estimating the IDF curves. It is actually a work in progress.

For who wants to start with Python (for hydrologists), I suggest to give a look to my blog post Python general resources. 

Below my own resources.

0 - A smooth introduction to Python scripting

1 - Reading a data file and looking inside it

2 - Reading a new file csv file and storing the data in a pandas DataFrame

3 - Estimating the parameters of a Gumbel distribution with

• moments method
• maximum likelihood
• minimum squares

4 - Pearson's Test

5 - Fitting the curves (some error here)

     Fitting the curves 

6 - Estimating pipes diameters

7 - Reading and plotting a Raster ASCII File (and its statistics)

Data:

Paperopoli 2
Paperopoli 4

For who wants to do the same numerics with R, she should look "A few R scripts useful for hydrologists".

Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate, and Water Extremes (1970-2012)

With the limits that these large scale project have, which is neglecting most of the micro-phenomena, as small landslides, that causes huge economical losses, and several life losses, this is, however, a reference to keep in mind when talking about climate related hazards.

It was produced by WMO and it is available here. As it reports in introduction:
"Weather, climate and water-related disasters are on the rise worldwide, causing loss of life and setting back economic and social development by years, if not decades. From 1970 to 2012, 8 835 disasters, 1.94 million deaths, and US$ 2.4 trillion of economic losses were reported globally as a result of hazards such as droughts, extreme temperatures, floods, tropical cyclones and related health epidemics, according to a new report."