PEOPLEAlice Crespi

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Alice Crespi

Senior Researcher
Center for Climate Change and Transformation

T +39 0471 055 264

alice.crespi@eurac.edu

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4186-8474

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About

Alice Crespi is a senior researcher at the Center for Climate Change and Transformation since 2019. She holds a master's degree in Physics with the University of Milan and in 2018 she received the PhD degree in the field of climatological studies at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy of the University of Milan.

She worked as researcher at the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences contributing to the assessment of climate change on water resources and water management for agriculture.

At Eurac Research her main activities concentrate on the analysis of climate and its variability with a focus on the mountain context and weather extremes. She contributes to the prediction and assessment of climate-related risks through the elaboration of tailored information on past climate and future climate-change scenarios.

Scientific Publications

Journal article2026

Recent and future variability in 1-day precipitation extremes in Trentino - South Tyrol (Eastern Italian Alps) based on observations (1956-2023) and climate model projections

Maines E, Crespi A, Pittore M, Zebisch M

Massimiliano Pittore, Marc Zebisch, Alice Crespi, Elena Maines

Precipitation extremes are some of the most impactful events in mountain environments due to their triggering potential for hazards, such as gravitational mass movements and floods, damaging human settlements and economic activities. Intensifying extreme precipitation has been documented for the Alps and projected for the future decades, although with substantial spatial variability. Understanding ongoing and future changes in heavy precipitation characteristics on a regional scale is crucial for informing risk-oriented applications and supporting local adaptation. This study presents a comprehensive assessment of 1-day precipitation extremes in Trentino – South Tyrol (eastern Italian Alps), based on past observations and climate model projections. We analyze observed trends and variability in intensity over the period 1956-2023 and assess changes under future global warming levels. A regional frequency analysis adopting a data-pooling approach is applied to estimate current and future occurrence probabilities of 1-day precipitation extremes. Increasing intensity and frequency are observed, with significant trends mostly in the northern part of the region, especially for autumn, summer and on an annual level. However, the long-term signal reveals decadal variations and a more pronounced increase over recent years. Greater intensity and frequency are also projected for the future throughout the region with major changes for higher warming levels and rarer events. Precipitation events like the one recorded during the exceptional Vaia Storm (October 2018) turn out to be more probable today than in earlier decades, and their recurrence interval is projected to further decrease by more than 50 % under the highest warming scenarios.

DOI

DOI: 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100880

Database2025

Italian precipitation records for the period 1921-1950 from the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School [Data set]

Manara V, Arcuri B, Beltrano MC, Bertoldi G, Brugnara Y, Brunetti M, Cat Berro D, Ceppi A,

Giacomo Bertoldi, Alice Crespi

Project: Eco-Hydrology of alpine watersheds, RETURN - multi-Risk sciEnce for resilienT commUnities undeR a changiNg climate

Within the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School (https://aisam.eu/progetti/cli-dare-at-school/), monthly precipitation data tables were digitized from the Publication N. 24 of the Italian Hydrographic Service. This publication consists of 14 issues published between 1955 and 1959. It spans the period from 1921 to 1950 (Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici (Consiglio Superiore – Servizio Idrografico), 1955; 1956; 1957a-f; 1958a-b; 1959a-d). Specifically, data for 3614 Italian stations was extracted.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15084062

Journal article2025

A new dataset of Italian precipitation records for the period 1921–1950 from the Cli-DaRe@School citizen science project

Manara V, Arcuri B, Brunetti M, Beltrano MC, Bertoldi G, Brugnara Y, Cat Berro D, Ceppi A,

Giacomo Bertoldi, Alice Crespi

Project: Eco-Hydrology of alpine watersheds

A huge heritage of meteorological data has been accumulated in the Italian archives over the past three centuries. The project Cli-DaRe@School, launched in 2022, aims to carry on a long-term pathway to strengthen citizen science initiatives to rescue these data by engaging high-school students within their “dual training” activities. In the last three years, the project focused on four monographs published by the Italian Hydrographic Service between 1918 and 1966 concerning both monthly precipitation and temperature data. This paper focuses on the largest among these monographs, which is Publication N. 24 of the Italian Hydrographic Service: it is organised in fourteen issues reporting monthly precipitation data for the period 1921–1950 for 3614 stations. About half of the data tables reported in this monograph were digitised within the Cli-DaRe@School project, while the data of the other stations were recovered from the SCIA (Sistema nazionali per la raccolta, l’elaborazione e la diffusione di dati Climatologici di Interesse Ambientale – the national system for the collection, processing, and dissemination of climatological data of environmental interest) dataset produced by Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and from a large dataset of long-term Italian records jointly set up by the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (CNR-ISAC) and the Milan University (UniMi) in the last 30 years. The scanned images of the monograph are stored and freely accessible in Portable Document Format at https://aisam.eu/progetti/cli-dare-at-school/, while the monthly precipitation data are freely accessible in tabular format at https://zenodo.org/records/15084062. The new dataset presented in this paper has the most complete coverage of monthly precipitation records in Italy for the period 1921–1950, allowing the possibility of analysing the precipitation variability for over a century in the past.

DOI

DOI: 10.1007/s42865-025-00111-3

Database2025

Alpine-wide climate indices from reanalyses and EURO-CORDEX projections for different Global Warming Levels

Lehner S, Crespi A, Žun M, Haslinger K, Pistotnik G, Maines E, Vlahović Ž, Campalani P,

Piero Campalani, Alice Crespi, Elena Maines

This data set contains calculated and aggregated climate indices for Reanalysis and EURO-CORDEX data on Global Warming Levels (GWLs) for the Alpine Space.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14704313

Journal article2025

climdex-kit: an open software for climate index calculation, sharing and analysis towards tailored climate services

Campalani P, Crespi A, Pittore M, Zebisch M

Piero Campalani, Massimiliano Pittore, Marc Zebisch, Alice Crespi

The paper presents the open-source software climdex-kit which includes modules to compute, analyze and visualize climate indices based on the input data, target domain and temporal extent defined by the user. It is intended to ease the retrieval and interpretation of meaningful information for climate change studies and support the development of climate services for sectoral applications with flexible options for tailoring the expected outputs. It currently includes the computation of 38 indices based on temperature and precipitation, describing both mean and extreme climate conditions, and it is designed to work with multi-model ensembles of climate projections. The tool is written in Python and integrates utilities from the well-established Climate Data Operators (CDO) and NetCDF Operators (NCO) libraries. The specific capabilities for filtering, aggregating and visualizing insightful information out of the computed indices ensembles make this software rather unique in the still rich landscape of available akin libraries, and are thought to help users to produce tailored results improving the understanding and communication of future climate change. The package climdex-kit can be used directly in interactive Python shells or be integrated as a building block in more complex data processing workflows. New indices can be easily configured and the software can be re-used on the spatial and temporal domains required by the specific application. Moreover, with its utilities to publish the climate indices in open catalogues, this software can be a one stop shop for a FAIR and simplified computation and management of such complex multi-scenario settings. To show the functionalities of the package as well as its potential use for conducting regional climate assessments, the application of climdex-kit to an ensemble of climate model projections for the Trentino – South Tyrol region (north-eastern Italy) is presented. Examples of derived information for a selection of indices are reported and different visualization options discussed.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106442

Journal article2025

EEAR-Clim: a high-density observational dataset of daily precipitation and air temperature for the Extended European Alpine Region

Bongiovanni G, Matiu M, Crespi A, Napoli A, Majone B, Zardi D

Alice Crespi

The Extended European Alpine Region (EEAR) exhibits a well-established and very high density network of in situ weather stations, hardly attained in other mountainous regions of the world. However, the strong fragmentation of the area into national and regional administrations and the diversity of data sources have hampered the full exploitation of the available data for climate research. Here, we present EEAR-Clim, a new observational dataset gathering in situ daily measurements of air temperature and precipitation from a variety of meteorological and hydrological services covering the whole EEAR. The data collected include time series from recordings of diverse lengths up to 2020, with the longest records spanning up to 200 years. The overall observational network encompasses about 9000 in situ weather stations, significantly enhancing data coverage at high elevations compared to existing datasets and achieving an average spatial density of one station per 6.8 km2 over the 1991–2020 period, the most covered by measurements. Data collected from many sources were tested for quality to ensure the internal, temporal, and spatial consistency of time series, including outlier removal. Data homogeneity was assessed through a cross-comparison of the break points detected by three methods that are well established in the literature, namely Climatol, ACMANT, and the RH test. Quantile matching was applied to adjust inhomogeneous periods in time series. Overall, about 4 % of data were flagged as unreliable, and about 20 % of air temperature time series were corrected for one or more inhomogeneous periods. In the case of precipitation time series, fewer break points were detected, confirming the well-known challenge of properly identifying inhomogeneities in noisy data. The high quality, homogeneity, unprecedented spatial density, and completeness of data and the inclusion of the most recent records are important add-on improvements compared to other observational products available for the EEAR. The dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10951609, Bongiovanni et al., 2024) aims to serve as a powerful tool to better understand climate change and climatic variability over the European Alps.

DOI

DOI: 10.5194/essd-17-1367-2025

Journal article2025

Engaging High School Students in Rescuing and Digitizing Data from Historical Observations in Italy: The Citizen Science Project Cli-DaRe@School

Manara V, Brunetti M, Beltrano MC, Bertoldi G, Brugnara Y, Cat Berro D, Ceppi A, Crespi A,

Giacomo Bertoldi, Alice Crespi

Project: Eco-Hydrology of alpine watersheds

Cli-DaRe@School is a citizen science project, started in spring 2022, whose main goal is to make a remarkable step forward toward the digitization of the huge heritage of historical Italian meteorological observations. These are still largely unexploited, as many records are only available on paper or as scanned images. In the first year, the project focused on four comprehensive monographs including about 6000 records of monthly temperature and precipitation data. A team of 334 students from 10 different high schools in Italy was engaged. Each school was assigned pdf files containing the scanned pages to digitize, along with spreadsheet templates for data entry and related tutorials. The person-hours dedicated to data digitization were about 4000, making about 4000 pages digitized. Students had the opportunity to join a training program consisting of seminars to delve into various aspects of climate change and meteorology, and specific activities aimed to make them aware of the potentialities of the recovered data. Cli-DaRe@School is an important two-fold initiative: It demonstrated the potentialities of high school students in providing an enormous contribution to past meteorological data rescue and proved to be of great educational value, offering young students an easy hands-on experience with climate data and making them more conscious of how science investigates past climatic trends. Therefore, we decided to continue with this experience and to make Cli-DaRe@School a permanent project to be offered to schools every year.

DOI

DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-24-0078.1

Report2025

Klimarisiken und Anpassung - Wege zu einem klimaresilienten Südtirol

Zebisch M, Pedoth L, Pörnbacher M, Renner K, Fritsch U, Alberton M, Bertoldi G, Bisignano J,

Chiara Pellegrini, Mariachiara Alberton, Giacomo Bertoldi, Federica Maino, Uta Fritsch, Andreas Hilpold, Andrea Omizzolo, Wolfram Sparber, Nikolaus Obojes, Lydia Pedoth, Kathrin Renner, Marc Zebisch, Alice Crespi, Philipp Corradini, Giacomo Strapazzon, Chiara Crippa, Christian Hoffmann, Matteo Prina, Giulia Roveri

Project: Climate Change Adaptation Strategy South Tyrol, 5a/2026 Environmental policy and law in multilevel systems, Eco-Hydrology of alpine watersheds

Der Bericht „Klimarisiken und Anpassung – Wege zu einem klimaresilienten Südtirol“ untersucht die möglichen Klimafolgen und Klimarisiken sowie deren Ursachen für Südtirol für neun Sektoren und schlägt Strategien und Maßnahmenbündel für eine notwendige Klimaanpassung vor. Er soll die Klimaanpassungsstrategie des Landes vorbereiten sowie informieren und setzt daher die Schwerpunkte auf Klimarisiken, die weite Teile Südtirols oder mehrere Systeme, Sektoren oder Handlungsfelder gleichzeitig betreffen und sich kaskadenartig ausbreiten. Außerdem fokussiert diese Studie auf Anpassungsstrategien und Maßnahmen (wie z.B. Politikinstrumente), die auf der Ebene der Provinz eingeführt und umgesetzt werden sollten, und weniger auf technische Maßnahmen in einzelnen Handlungsfeldern.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.57749/4ehb-1753

Journal article2025

More intense heatwaves under drier conditions: a compound event analysis in the Adige River basin (Eastern Italian Alps)

Lemus-Canovas M, Crespi A, Maines E, Terzi S, Pittore M

Massimiliano Pittore, Alice Crespi, Stefano Terzi, Elena Maines

The Adige River basin has been affected several times in recent years by concurrent very hot and dry conditions. In summers 2015, 2017, and more recently in 2021–2022, severe hydrological droughts compounded and cascaded with wildfire and heatwave events. The chained effect of snow deficit in winter, higher-than-normal temperatures in early spring and heatwaves during summer caused multiple drought impacts. Despite the severe consequences, the role of observed climate change in exacerbating the intensity of the drivers leading to specific hot and dry events and their potential impacts in this region remains poorly understood.

A ranking of compound drought and heatwave events (CDHW) occurring in the Adige River basin between 1950 and 2023 was built using E-OBS precipitation and temperature observations. The ranking was based on a composite index considering both event intensity and the spatial extent of the affected area, derived from the Standardised Precipitation Index at a 6 month scale (SPI-6) and a heatwave definition based on daily maximum temperature (TX). The major 2022 CDHW event, which caused severe environmental and societal impacts in the Adige River catchment, stood out. Occurring in late spring (10–28 May 2022), it ranked fifth out of 119 events detected since 1950 and was the most intense CDHW event in the past 15 years. As one of the most recent and severe CDHW events, the 2022 event was selected for an in-depth characterisation and a climate change attribution analysis of both its meteorological drivers and hydrological impacts.

The changing characteristics of CDHW events similar to that of May 2022 were investigated through a flow-analogue attribution approach based on the reconstruction of its atmospheric conditions using ERA5 geopotential height at 500 hPa. By comparing May 2022 CDHW flow analogues from 1951–1980 (low anthropogenic forcing) and 1992–2021 (moderate-high anthropogenic forcing), we found that heatwaves comparable to the one in May 2022 are now significantly hotter – by 1–4 °C – than historical analogues and occur in a much drier context, characterised by pronounced precipitation deficits. These conditions, along with earlier snowmelt and persistent precipitation deficits, might have exacerbated river flow reductions and water stress in recent years. Also, shifts in the timing of a CDHW event were found to significantly influence the severity of its potential consequences.

However, extracting a reliable signal of future changes in the characteristics of CDHW events from climate projections remains challenging. Based on flow-conditioned analogues of the May 2022 event from 25 EURO-CORDEX simulations, more than half of the models failed to reproduce the observed sign of change in temperature and drought conditions. Unconditioned reconstructions showed closer agreement with observations, particularly for temperature patterns, but critical aspects such as the magnitude of the changes remained underestimated.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5194/hess-29-6781-2025

Journal article2025

Review of bias correction methods for climate model outputs in hydrology

Menapace A, Dahwan P, Dalla Torre D, Kaffas K, Crespi A, Larcher M, Righetti M, Cannon AJ

Alice Crespi, Andrea Menapace

Global and regional climate models are critical drivers in hydrological modelling for hindcast analyses, supporting various horizon predictions, and climate change scenarios. Bias correction of climate model outputs is still required for reliable hydrological applications despite continuous improvements to increase resolution and accuracy of climate models. We propose a comprehensive review of the scientific contributions of bias correction methodologies for climate model outputs in hydrological applications. To complement the review, the main bias correction methods are tested on two case studies: one involving reanalysis simulations and the other focusing on climate change projections, to enrich the comparison with various scientific outcomes. A final discussion summarises the performance of various bias correction methods and to highlight the main findings from this systematic overview.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.133213

Report2025

Rischi climatici e adattamento - Verso un Alto Adige resiliente al clima

Zebisch M, Pedoth L, Pörnbacher M, Renner K, Fritsch U, Alberton M, Bertoldi G, Bisignano J,

Project: Climate Change Adaptation Strategy South Tyrol

Il documento “Rischi climatici e adattamento – Verso un Alto Adige resiliente al clima” analizza i possibili impatti, i rischi climatici e le loro cause per l’Alto Adige in nove settori e propone strategie e pacchetti di misure per il necessario adattamento. Lo scopo è quello di preparare e informare la strategia di adattamento ai cambiamenti climatici della Provincia; pertanto, si concentra sui rischi climatici che interessano vaste zone dell'Alto Adige o che colpiscono contemporaneamente diversi sistemi, settori o campi d'azione e si diffondono a cascata. Inoltre, questo studio si concentra sulle strategie e sulle misure di adattamento (come gli strumenti politici) che dovrebbero essere introdotte e implementate a livello provinciale, piuttosto che sulle misure tecniche nei singoli campi di azione.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.57749/q8y8-tv70

Conference proceedings article2025

The contribution to the recovery of precipitation and temperature data before mid-1950 over the Italian territory by the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School

Manara V, Arcuri B, Brunetti M, Beltrano M C, Bertoldi G, Brugnara Y, Cat Berro D, Ceppi A,

Giacomo Bertoldi, Alice Crespi

Project: RETURN - multi-Risk sciEnce for resilienT commUnities undeR a changiNg climate

Cli-DaRe@School is a Citizen Science project (https://aisam.eu/progetti/cli-dare-at-school/) aiming at digitising unexploited Italian meteorological observations still available only on paper or as scanned images. It was launched in 2022 as an initiative of the Italian Association of Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (AISAM) involving researchers, high-school students, and teachers.

Until now, the project focused on digitizing four monographs published by the Italian Hydrographic Service on monthly temperature and precipitation data for the Italian territory. The temperature data covers 1926-1955, while the precipitation data refers to the years before 1950. During two academic years, a team of more than 500 students from more than 10 high schools was engaged in supporting digitization in the framework of a national work trainee program for students, making about 7931 station records available. Each school was provided with pdf files containing the scanned pages to be digitized, along with spreadsheet templates for data entry, and related tutorials. Students also had the opportunity to participate in a training program offered by the project, which consisted of seminars and activities specifically designed for them. Their goal was to allow the students to delve into various aspects of climate change and to make them aware of the potential of the recovered data. Cli-DaRe@School, on the one hand, demonstrates the potential of high school students to make an enormous contribution to rescuing past meteorological data; on the other hand, it has a great educational value, offering young students an experience with climate data.

At the end of each year, we sent a questionnaire to both students and teachers to gauge their satisfaction with the project activities and to gather suggestions for the following years. The questionnaire revealed a good level of satisfaction among the teachers and students, with the most critical point being the number of hours devoted to digitization.

The quality control of the digitized data, partly automatic using an R code and partly manual, is finished for precipitation over the period 1921-1950, whereas it is still in progress for the previous years and for temperature. The station metadata proved to be a frequent source of errors, while the digitized precipitation and temperature records have a very low error rate. Project results have been published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-24-0078.1). The newly rescued precipitation records for the period 1921-1950 are already freely available (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15084062) while, for the other periods, data publication is still in progress. In parallel, the application of Optical Character Recognition techniques to extend the data rescue also to the daily records is currently under evaluation.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5194/ems2025-179

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Conference proceedings article2025

The contribution to the recovery of precipitation and temperature data before mid-1950 over the Italian territory by the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School

Manara V, Arcuri B, Brunetti M, Beltrano M C, Bertoldi G, Brugnara Y, Cat Berro D, Ceppi A,

Giacomo Bertoldi, Alice Crespi

Project: RETURN - multi-Risk sciEnce for resilienT commUnities undeR a changiNg climate

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5194/ems2025-179

Alice Crespi

About

Scientific Publications

Recent and future variability in 1-day precipitation extremes in Trentino - South Tyrol (Eastern Italian Alps) based on observations (1956-2023) and climate model projections

Italian precipitation records for the period 1921-1950 from the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School [Data set]

A new dataset of Italian precipitation records for the period 1921–1950 from the Cli-DaRe@School citizen science project

Alpine-wide climate indices from reanalyses and EURO-CORDEX projections for different Global Warming Levels

climdex-kit: an open software for climate index calculation, sharing and analysis towards tailored climate services

EEAR-Clim: a high-density observational dataset of daily precipitation and air temperature for the Extended European Alpine Region

Engaging High School Students in Rescuing and Digitizing Data from Historical Observations in Italy: The Citizen Science Project Cli-DaRe@School

Klimarisiken und Anpassung - Wege zu einem klimaresilienten Südtirol

More intense heatwaves under drier conditions: a compound event analysis in the Adige River basin (Eastern Italian Alps)

Review of bias correction methods for climate model outputs in hydrology

Rischi climatici e adattamento - Verso un Alto Adige resiliente al clima

The contribution to the recovery of precipitation and temperature data before mid-1950 over the Italian territory by the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School

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Scientific Publications

Recent and future variability in 1-day precipitation extremes in Trentino - South Tyrol (Eastern Italian Alps) based on observations (1956-2023) and climate model projections

Italian precipitation records for the period 1921-1950 from the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School [Data set]

A new dataset of Italian precipitation records for the period 1921–1950 from the Cli-DaRe@School citizen science project

Alpine-wide climate indices from reanalyses and EURO-CORDEX projections for different Global Warming Levels

climdex-kit: an open software for climate index calculation, sharing and analysis towards tailored climate services

EEAR-Clim: a high-density observational dataset of daily precipitation and air temperature for the Extended European Alpine Region

Engaging High School Students in Rescuing and Digitizing Data from Historical Observations in Italy: The Citizen Science Project Cli-DaRe@School

Klimarisiken und Anpassung - Wege zu einem klimaresilienten Südtirol

More intense heatwaves under drier conditions: a compound event analysis in the Adige River basin (Eastern Italian Alps)

Review of bias correction methods for climate model outputs in hydrology

Rischi climatici e adattamento - Verso un Alto Adige resiliente al clima

The contribution to the recovery of precipitation and temperature data before mid-1950 over the Italian territory by the Citizen Science project Cli-DaRe@School