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Extremely dry and warm conditions in northern Italy during the year 2015: effects on the Po river water

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Abstract

The presented research highlights relationships between the climatic anomalies that occurred in northern Italy in 2015 and the water system of Po river. We investigated the effect of anomalous high temperature and paucity of meteoric precipitation on the Po river discharge and water geochemistry. The new geochemical data, carried out on river water sampled at Pontelagoscuro (close to the city of Ferrara) and in the delta, have been compared with an extended dataset collected since 2009. The comparison emphasizes that water samples of 2015 were characterized by a high electrical conductivity due to high concentrations of conservative ionic species (e.g. Na, Cl, SO4) and nutrients such as nitrate. Oxygen and hydrogen isotopes, particularly sensitive to the observed climatic changes, reveal in a δ18O-δD diagram evaporative trends (highlighted by displacement from the Meteoric Water Lines) with a magnitude that was not recorded in the last years. The monitoring is currently in progress to develop functions that relate geochemical parameters to the evolving meteo-hydrological conditions.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Province of Ferrara and the ARPA Emilia Romagna for technical support. The authors also thank the Referees and the Editor for the constructive criticism that greatly improved an early version of the paper. In addition, the authors are grateful to Anam Amin (PhD student of the University of Padova) for her linguistic review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento Territorio e Sistemi Agro-Forestali (TESAF), Università degli Studi di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, Legnaro, PD, 35020, Italy

    Chiara Marchina

  2. Dipartimento di Fisica e Scienze della Terra, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Via G. Saragat 1, Ferrara, 44122, Italy

    Chiara Marchina, Claudio Natali, Massimiliano Fazzini, Matteo Fusetti, Renzo Tassinari & Gianluca Bianchini

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  1. Chiara Marchina
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  2. Claudio Natali
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  3. Massimiliano Fazzini
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  4. Matteo Fusetti
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  5. Renzo Tassinari
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  6. Gianluca Bianchini
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Correspondence to Chiara Marchina.

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Marchina, C., Natali, C., Fazzini, M. et al. Extremely dry and warm conditions in northern Italy during the year 2015: effects on the Po river water. Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei 28, 281–290 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-017-0596-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-017-0596-0

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