Sensibilità climatica ai parametri della vegetazione per i processi all'interfaccia suolo-atmosfera in UTOPIA sulla regione alpina

In the present study the methodology CLIPS is applied using climate model output instead of meteorological observations to drive the SVATs model. Moreover, the time span used is sufficiently wide (30 years) in order to make possible a climatological analysis of the result. The climate model and the SVATs selected have been the RegCM3 and the UTOPIA (University of TOrino model of land Process Interaction with Atmosphere), respectively. The first aim of this study is the analysis of the influence of the vegetation parameters in UTOPIA on some land surface processes (like the latent and sensible heat fluxes). The data used for this analysis came from a chain of model simulations. The output of the simulations performed with the regional climate model RegCM using the future climate scenario A2 have been used as input data for the simulations performed with the UTOPIA model. The domain chosen for this study is the rectangular mesoscale area, including the most of the Alpine region and the Po river basin. The most relevant result of this part of the work is a significant difference in the output for the latent heat flux when UTOPIA has been run with a correct vegetation parametrization (according to the Wilson and Henderson-Sellers database) if compared with the one obtained with the short grass everywhere (used as a benchmark). In the second part of the work the components of the energy budget for two possible future scenarios have been analyzed and compared to the present climate. In particular, the 30 years periods 2071-2100 belonging to the two scenarios A2 and B2 have been compared with the period 1961-1990 (present climate). The outputs have been grouped and averaged according to the vegetation kind and elevation above the sea level. The results show an increment of the latent heat flux (and of the evapotranspiration) during the warm period, more evident in the plains. It is also evident an anticipation if the snow melting season for the future climates (with an important reduction of the amount of snowy precipitations) even stronger for the A2 scenario. It will be possible to use this preliminary results to perform further analysis on the future climate impacts on the land surface processes.