Trends in Italian total cloud amount, 1951-1996

Trends in Italian total cloud amount are analysed for the period 1951-1996. The data are a set of 35 station records that were extracted from the 3-hourly Italian Air Force dataset. A method is discussed to obtain daily mean cloud amounts avoiding biases due to missing observations: less than 2 % of the days have no observations, but more than 20 % of them have at least one missing value. Trend analysis is applied to regional Northern and Southern Italy average series. Seasonal and annual trends were estimated by means of least squares linear fitting. Significance was tested using the non parametric Mann-Kendall test. The results show that there is a highly significant negative trend in total cloud amount all over Italy. It is evident in all seasons and is particularly steep in winter where both in Northern and Southern Italy the decrease exceeds 1 okta in 50 years.