The Department of Geosciences of the University of Padova, in collaboration with the PE3-RETURN project, will organise an international Summer School from July 14 to July 19, 2025, to be held at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti in Venice. The central theme is "Water and Geological Risks in a Warming Climate".

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Marco Borga, Marco Marani, Nicola Surian (University of Padova, Italy)

WORKING GROUPS

WG Marani: Extreme Precipitation Event Modelling

This WG will focus on analyzing rainfall observations from the 5-min to 1-hour scale. Estimation uncertainty from GEVanalyses will be compared with that from non-asymptotic Metastatistical Extreme Value Distribution (MEVD) methods. A cross-validation approach will be adopted and applied to available data from different rainfall regimes, in Italy and elsewhere. Participants wanting to explore the application of MEVD methods to their own data, beyond rainfall observations, are welcomed to join. The activities will be tutored by Dr. Maria Francesca Caruso and by ing. Santa Andria.

WG Dallan-Marra: Assessing Future Changes in Sub-Daily Precipitation Return Levels using Convection Permitting Climate models

In this working group we will evaluate the projected changes in extreme sub-daily precipitation using convection-permitting (CP) climate model simulations. We will focus on a study area characterized by complex orography and use both traditional and non-asymptotic extreme value analysis methods. Participants will learn how to estimate precipitation return levels for various durations (ranging from 1 to 24 hours) using different statistical techniques. They will learn how to quantify changes in these return levels and how to assess the statistical significance of the detected signals. The activity will be carried out in Matlab. Partecipants are NOT expected to be expert Matlab users, as the Matlab scripts will be provided by the tutors, but they are expected to have a laptop with a working Matlab version pre-installed.

WG Tramblay-Borga: Trend detection in time series of extreme events

Methods used to detect trends in intense rainfall or flood series will be presented. Firstly, sampling methods based on annual maximums or threshold exceedances will be introduced, with the problem of threshold selection, and identification of independent episodes (declustering). Then, non-parametric methods (Mann-Kendall test) will be compared with parametric methods, based on the adjustment of distributions adapted to extremes (Generalized Extreme Value et Generalized Pareto Distribution) in a non-stationary context. The issue of the 'statistical significance' of the results will be discussed within the different approaches. All the methods will be implemented from open-source R packages.

WG Brenna-Surian: River Dynamics in Response to High-Magnitude Flood Events

This WG will focus on processes (e.g., intense sediment transport, channel widening) that may occur in rivers and streams during high-magnitude flood events. We will analyze a catchment that was affected by the Vaia Storm (October 2018), starting from computing stream power at sub-reach scale. The next step will be analyzing channel changes, comparing images (high resolution aerial photos) taken before and after the flood. The last part of the activity will deal with interpretation and discussion of results, exploring relationships between driving factors (e.g., stream power) and channel processes (e.g., occurrence of debris floods, different magnitude of channel widening).The activity will be carried out using a GIS. Participants are expected to have a laptop with a GIS installed and basic knowledge about GIS (e.g., loading data, using and editing shapefiles).

 Here the Summer School Schedule