SOL40: Forty Years of Simulations under Climate and Land Use Change

Abstract

Nowadays, a major issue is land-use change by urban development that alters the catchment response to meteorological events. Urban basins have less storage capacity and more rapid runoff, so urban rivers rise more quickly during storms and have higher peak discharge rates than rural catchments. An exemplary case of this situation is the city of Milan (northern Italy) and its whole territory that extends towards the north collecting meteoric precipitation through the Seveso, Olona and Lambro (SOL) rivers. To assess the impact of anthropogenic development on urban catchment scale hydrology, a reanalysis of 40 years of simulations was carried out with the Curve Number (CN) map based on current land use and compared to simulations using the CN maps based on past land use. A coupled hydro-meteorological system was built that combined a physically based rainfall-runoff hydrological model FEST-WB, developed by the Politecnico di Milano, with the ERA5-Land hourly dataset for the period 1981 to 2020, that was provided by the ECMWF under the framework of the Copernicus Climate Change Service Programme. The study (named SOL40) analyses 40 year trends in the main meteorological (air temperature, precipitation) and hydrological variables (runoff) over the SOL area and tried to quantify and separate the impact of land use change from that of climate change.