Monitoring and Forecasting Drought on a Regional Scale: Emilia-Romagna Region.

This chapter presents an overview of the occurrences and effects of droughts through a study of the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) in the Emilia-Romagna region, which is located in the northern-central part of the Italian peninsula. The link between this index and large-scale atmospheric circulation was investigated and the SPI index was also used to predict drought. The study describes the development of a method of forecasting SPI index based on an earlier Interregional project (SEDEMED), involving a statistical downscaling scheme model using as input the large-scale seasonal forecasts obtained from Atmospheric Global Circulation Models. The downscaling scheme, which has already been used with relatively good results to predict surface parameters of temperature and precipitation, is applied to the SPI index, providing a statistical regionalization of this indicator [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]