Detection of Rainfall and Runoff Trends of the Adda River in Lecco (1845-2014) at Different Time Scales

8 pages•Published: September 20, 2018

Roberto Ranzi, Massimo Tomirotti, Michele Brunetti, Alice Crespi and Maurizio Maugeri

Abstract

A recovery of ancient records of the Como Lake water levels at the Fortilizio in Lecco hydrometric station enabled the reconstruction of a time series of daily water level and runoff from the Como Lake spanning the 1845-2014 period. In parallel, the monthly areal precipitation at the Adda river catchment scale was estimated for the same 170 years- long period. This time series, which is one of the longest available for Italian riverbasins will support analyses of the reasons of changes in the runoff regime in response to climatic and anthropogenic changes. A comparison of the two series applying the Mann- Kendall, Spearman and Theil-Sen trend tests, shows a decline, in the long term, of runoff and a more significant one of precipitation. Because some changes in the operation at the outlet of the Como Lake occurred after 1946 and also in the storage capacity of the upstream reservoirs the time series was splitted in two periods, before and after 1946. The results of the statistical tests for both precipitation and runoff in three time periods are consistent, but only for the time series of annual runoff the decline is statistically significant with 5% significance level. To analyse if changes occurred at different time scales the wavelet transform was applied to the daily runoff series. Finally the Fourier power spectrum of the the daily runoff data shows a signal of higher energy corresponding to a period between 11 and 13 years, close to the sunspots cycle period, and its significance is under investigation.

Keyphrases: adda river, climate change, long term records, trend detection, wavelet transform

In: Goffredo La Loggia, Gabriele Freni, Valeria Puleo and Mauro De Marchis (editors). HIC 2018. 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics, vol 3, pages 1727-1734.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/Qjzc
	https://doi.org/10.29007/gbqh

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{HIC2018:Detection_Rainfall_Runoff_Trends,
  author    = {Roberto Ranzi and Massimo Tomirotti and Michele Brunetti and Alice Crespi and Maurizio Maugeri},
  title     = {Detection of Rainfall and Runoff Trends of the Adda River in Lecco (1845-2014) at Different Time Scales},
  booktitle = {HIC 2018. 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics},
  editor    = {Goffredo La Loggia and Gabriele Freni and Valeria Puleo and Mauro De Marchis},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Engineering},
  volume    = {3},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2516-2330},
  url       = {/publications/paper/Qjzc},
  doi       = {10.29007/gbqh},
  pages     = {1727-1734},
  year      = {2018}}

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