(Starting from 1/1/1995 the new address of SMR-ER will be: Viale Silvani, 6 40122 Bologna, Italy.)
The Regional Meteorological Service of the Emilia Romagna Region in Northern Italy (SMR-ER) operates in the south-eastern part of the Po Valley basin since 1984 and is mainly devoted to the observing and forecasting of meteorological parameters on a very local scale.
To fulfill this objective, during the past years some studies have been carried on to characterize the region from the climatological point of view. To this purpose typical mesoscale regimes of weather surface parameters as temperature and rainfall have been defined with their connection to the large scale dynamical flow systems (Caccia mani et al. 1994a).
Studies on the climatology of thunderstorm activity have been also performed regarding the Po Valley area (Cacciamani and Simonini 1988; Cacciamani et al. 1994b).
During the past years numerical experimentation, using limited area modelling tech nique, has been performed at the SMR-ER by using the LAMBO model. This model, running operationally at SMR/ER at 20 km horizontal resolution, is based on a ver sion of the NMC eta model. Case studies of intense precipitation events have been investigated in order to understand the role of the interaction of large scale systems with orography in the development of deep convection in the Northern Italian area (Paccagnella et al. 1992). Numerical experimentation have also been addressed at the evaluation of the model capability in reproducing low-level mesoscale circulation sys tems, downslope winds episodes, both of them induced mainly by the orography and already observed during the Alpex experiment (Tampieri et al. 1984). As regards meteorological and climatological networks, in the past years SMR-ER upgraded the conventional meteorological network already existent adding a lot of new surface automatic stations, one radio sounding station and a very modern Dual Polarisation, DopplerC-band radar.
The radar is fully operational since summer 1992 and is mainly devoted to supply the needs of the agricultural users, such as crop soil water balance, hay curing, nitrogen leaching and so on. Furthermore the availability of the differential reflectivity ZDR allows a discrimination in the phase of the meteorological targets, giving information about the presence of hail in the clouds.
In addition, like the usual radar-raingauge calibration, the radar hail signatures can be checked against the data coming from a dense hailpad network which covers most of the Emilia Romagna territory. The Doppler capability of the radar put in evidence some peculiar characteristics of the severe convective systems, such as the strong updraft and downdraft motions as well as some mechanisms which fed the circulation inside the multicell storms (Alberoni et al. 1994a).
During June 1990 SMR-ER organized the MATREP experiment, with other meteorological institutions operating in Northern Italy. This experiment was addressed to monitor thunderstorm activity in the whole Po Valley area (Buzzi et al. 1991; Bonelli et al. 1990). In that occasion different data were put together belonging from conventional surface and upper air observations, remote sensed data (radar data and Meteosat digital images) in a well suited database. This database was utilized for study of single cases of strong convection activity either as regard a conventional synoptic and mesoscale analysis, (Alberoni et al.1993) and at the scale of the thunderstorm cells by using the integrated information of the radars network (Alberoni et al. 1994b).
The data of MATREP experiment have been also used to test the statistical behaviour of LAMBO model in the whole June 1990 period (Pelosini and Paccagnella 1993). During this verification procedure the impact of having denser data set to verify high resolution numerical forecasts appeared to be really essential. For the above mentioned topics, the MAP experiment can be considered a very important occasion to improve the knowledge of the meso-scale meteorological features in ourregion. Therefore SMR-ER is interested to participate to the project putting at disposal of the scientific community all the data available in its region and all the previous results that can be considered useful to the planning of the experiment.
MAP Newsletter. October`00