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Francesco Marra

Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Physics

Department of Geosciences

University of Padova

An atmospheric physicist at the interface with
hydrology, climatology, geomorphology, and statistics
​​

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News

News

Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology

Award

Finalist: Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology

My idea  "A system to quantify insurance premiums for extreme rainfall downpours" was among the three finalists of the Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology. The idea is to combine near term forecasts with a physics-informed statistical model to develop an open source system able to predict the probability of extreme downpours from changes in wet-day temperature. I proposed a cooperation with insurance and reinsurance professionals to refine and validate the system. 

Congrats to Assaf Shmuel for the deserved win!

A 2°C warming can double the frequency of extreme summer downpours in the Alps

Scientific publication

Doubling extreme summer rainfall in the Alps

In a new paper published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, we show that an average temperature increase of 2°C could double the frequency of short-duration summer thunderstorms in the Alpine region: what today happens every half-century could occur every 25 years in the future.

Jim Dooge Award ceremony 2024

Award

Jim Dooge Award to the TENAX paper

Our paper "Predicting extreme sub-hourly precipitation intensification based on temperature shifts" has received the 2024 Jim Dooge Award from Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) as one of the outstanding papers of the year.
In this paper, we introduce a new statistical model (TENAX) to predict changes in extreme sub-hourly precipitation using physical covariates.

Models

Models

SMEV

SMEV provides a robust framework for frequency analyses of extremes and is particularly well-suited for extreme precipitation. It relies on non-asymptotic assumptions based on atmospheric physics and can handle extremes emerging from multiple underlying processes. 

TENAX

With the TENAX model, one can project sub-hourly precipitation extremes at different return levels based on daily scale projections from climate models in any location globally where observations of sub-hourly precipitation data and near-surface air temperature are available.

TENAX-CDS

TENAX-CDS computes short-duration IDF curves and design storms for flash flood assessments under increasing temperatures based on the TENAX framework. Design storms are created using the Chigago design storm appraoch. The framework requires a minimal set of parameters and input data.

Weibull tail test

Atmospheric physics shows that extreme precipitation probability should approximately decrease as a powered-exponential as precipitation magnitude increases. These codes provide a Monte Carlo test to evaluate whether an available sample is likely drawn from a distribution with powered-exponential (Weibull) tail.

Non-stationary SMEV

Non-stationary implementation of the SMEV model. Maximum likelihood parameter estimation with left-censoring for a nonstationary two-parameter Weibull distribution in which both parameters (may) depend linearly on a covariate. Tests for the statistical significance of the dependences are provided.

Group Members

Team

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