IT-WATER: the future of water resources in Italy

The IT-WATER project has officially started, an initiative funded by the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) aimed at producing detailed drought scenarios in Italy through high-performance computing technologies. Thanks to the collaboration between CIMA Research Foundation, Fadeout Software, and ItaliaMeteo, the project aims to tackle the challenges of climate change to support the sustainability of water resources on a national scale.

The (in)visible crisis of water resources

What happens when water, a fundamental resource for life, begins to run scarce? In Italy, this is increasingly becoming a concrete reality. Events such as the severe drought affecting Sicily and the water scarcity in the central-northern regions over the past two years are alarming signals that urge us to reconsider our relationship with water. Today, we are facing a water crisis that not only represents an economic damage due to its effects on agriculture and industry but also begins to impact the daily life of each of us, putting health and food security at risk.

IT-WATER aims to improve the understanding of water resources in Italy by creating the first high-resolution national scenarios on the evolution of drought for the country. By involving entities with complementary expertise, ranging from geoscientific knowledge to computational skills, IT-WATER is positioned not only as a research project aimed at understanding the ongoing changes but also as an attempt to provide practical tools for the country's resilience to drought hazards. In this context, the IT-WATER project begins, financed by the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and led by CIMA Research Foundation in collaboration with Fadeout Software Srl and taliaMeteo. IT-WATER aims to improve the understanding of water resources in Italy by creating the first high-resolution national scenarios on the evolution of drought for the country. By involving entities with complementary expertise, ranging from geoscientific knowledge to computational skills, IT-WATER is positioned not only as a research project aimed at understanding the ongoing changes but also as an attempt to provide practical tools for the country's resilience to drought hazards.

Understanding changes

How will water resources in Italy evolve in a climate change scenario? While national adaptation plans to climate change and climate scenarios such as those produced by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) exist, there is a lack of specific, spatially distributed, and unique forecasts at the national level that extend such scenarios to the water cycle, particularly the drought hazard.

"IT-WATER was created to fill this scientific gap and provide a unique national framework on the future of water resources and the drought hazard," explains our researcher Francesco Avanzi, project lead, who highlights how the ongoing drought in Italy over the last three years has revealed the urgency of better understanding how droughts will evolve in the future.

An Italian map of future droughts

IT-WATER aims to calculate a high-resolution scenario integrating climate change and water availability on a national level.

"Water does not follow our administrative boundaries," observes Avanzi, "and water availability crosses regional and national borders. In conditions of abundant water, we don't perceive this reality much, but in drought situations, it becomes evident how our water supply spans different institutional levels, each with its own responsibilities. This is where the idea of studying the future drought hazard for the entire country originates".

This unified vision is important in the Italian context, which is particularly vulnerable to drought, exacerbated by climatic and geographical factors: "The country, with its typically Mediterranean climate, experiences extremely dry summer periods, precisely when water demand is at its highest. In the north, rising temperatures threaten the stability of mountain water reserves, with the reduction of glaciers and snowfall, while in the south, where summers are getting hotter, evapotranspiration further pressures water availability. With IT-WATER, these dynamics will be mapped at a national scale to provide useful data for informing mitigation and adaptation strategies in the Italian context," continues the researcher.

The technological infrastructure and High-Performance Computing (HPC)

To simulate the past and future water cycle across Italy, IT-WATER uses high-performance computing (HPC), a technology that allows complex calculations to be performed in reduced time using computational resources provided by CINECA's technological infrastructure. The HPC system enables the project to process vast amounts of climatic and hydrological data, making it possible to construct hourly high-resolution scenarios for the entire national territory. "With HPC," explains Avanzi, "we can reconstruct the water cycle hour by hour, every 500 meters, on a spatial and temporal scale much more detailed than what can be achieved with traditional computational tools."

The simulations, which will cover a 150-year period, not only require significant computing capacity but also careful design of the computational code and hydrological algorithms. The project will simulate two greenhouse gas scenarios to analyze different potential climate trajectories, including key variables such as precipitation, snow, glaciers, soil moisture, and river discharge. "Today," adds Avanzi, "we have the ability to manage calculations of this magnitude thanks to the simultaneous use of thousands of computing units." The adopted approach represents a leap forward for our research.

While the technological aspect presents one of the challenges of the project, the accuracy of the data over such an extended time frame is another critical issue. In-depth analysis will be necessary to ensure that the models remain realistic and consistent with such long-term and distant future scenarios.

The legacy of IT-WATER

"Our goal is to organize a workshop by next summer with various institutional actors to analyze the preliminary results of the project and jointly define the final specifications: understanding which information is needed, at what resolution, and on which time scales," says Francesco Avanzi. "We will simulate the water cycle through the second half of the 21st century: how to transform this massive amount of data into added information? We are currently in the crucial phase of mapping these actors, with whom we will establish contacts in the coming months."

In this direction, IT-WATER also aims to make the project results accessible to all through an open dataset, applying the principles of open science. "Making data open is essential," says Avanzi, "because science that does not share its results is incomplete." Not only the data, but also the developed IT infrastructure will be made open-source, allowing other entities to replicate the approach and adapt it to other regions or countries.

With IT-WATER, we hope to leave two scientific legacies: on one hand, offering a unique dataset for Italy that can serve as a basis for further studies and decision-making applications; on the other, contributing to raising awareness of the drought risk, presenting it as a strategic challenge to be planned and addressed collectively.

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