PEOPLEElena Maines

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Elena Maines

PhD Student
Center for Climate Change and Transformation

T +39 0471 055 750

elena.maines@eurac.edu

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7391-4595

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About

Elena Maines holds a Master degree in Environmental Meteorology from the University of Trento (2023), with a background in Physics. She is passionate about advancing the understanding of climate impacts and providing scientific support for regional climate resilience and adaptation strategies. At the Center for Climate Change and Transformation of Eurac Research, she focuses on evaluating climate variability, long-term trends, and extreme weather events within the context of regional climate change. Her work also involves contributing to the development of tools that support climate services.

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

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

Assessing Climate Impact on Heritage Buildings in Trentino—South Tyrol with High-Resolution Projections

Stella Blavier CL, Maines E, Campalani P, Huerto-Cardenas HE, Del Pero C, Leonforte F

Piero Campalani, Elena Maines

Climate variations impact the preservation of heritage buildings, necessitating a strategic understanding of potential effects to effectively guide preservation efforts. This study analyzes temperature- and precipitation-dependent climate-heritage indices in Trentino–South Tyrol using EURO-CORDEX regional climate models for the period 1971–2100 under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios. The selected indices were calculated with climdex-kit and relied on bias-adjusted temperature and precipitation data with a 1 km spatial resolution. The obtained results indicate a geographically punctuated increase in biomass accumulation on horizontal surfaces, a slight decreasing trend in freeze–thaw events, an increase in growing degree days indicating a small, heightened insect activity, and a rise in heavy precipitation days. The Scheffer Index shows a significantly increased potential for wood degradation, particularly under the RCP 8.5 scenario, while the Wet-Frost Index remains consistently low. Finally, according to each identified hazard, adaptive solutions are suggested. These findings provide critical insights into future climate impacts on heritage buildings in the region, aiding stakeholders in planning targeted interventions. The study emphasizes the crucial role of integrating detailed climate data into heritage preservation strategies, advocating for the inclusion of future risk analysis in the “knowledge path” in order to enhance the resilience of buildings.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3390/atmos16070799

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

Conference proceedings article2024

Reconstruction of satellite-based evapotranspiration under all-sky conditions in the Alps

Bartkowiak P, Maines E, Crespi A, Castelli M

Mariapina Castelli, Alice Crespi, Paulina Bartkowiak, Elena Maines

Project: Calibrating Earth Observation-based impacts of drought on mountain forests by monitoring Carbon fixation and transpiration: from individual tree responses to regional scale extrapolation

Evapotranspiration (ET) driven by thermal infrared remote sensing provides spatiotemporally distributed information on water availability at large scale. However, cloudy-sky conditions result in gaps in satellite-based ET, especially in complex landscapes such as the Alps. In this regard, we investigate different reconstruction approaches to fill missing ET at six alpine flux sites in Italy and Switzerland. The gapfilling is performed by three main steps: establishing a relationship between clear-sky actual ET and different estimates of reference quantities, interpolation of these dependencies to overcast conditions, and predicting ET by applying interpolated factors to reference quantities. The performance of the reconstruction strongly depends on landcover, achieving the best results over grasslands (RMSE = 0.38 mm day-1) and less performant outcomes over forest (RMSE = 0.70 mm day-1) when reference quantities from Penman-Monteith and Priestley-Taylor formulations are applied. The findings of this work give next-future perspectives for all-sky ET retrieval using remote sensing.

DOI

DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS53475.2024.10641718

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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

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5194/hess-29-6781-2025

Elena Maines

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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

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

Assessing Climate Impact on Heritage Buildings in Trentino—South Tyrol with High-Resolution Projections

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

Reconstruction of satellite-based evapotranspiration under all-sky conditions in the Alps

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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

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

Assessing Climate Impact on Heritage Buildings in Trentino—South Tyrol with High-Resolution Projections

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

Reconstruction of satellite-based evapotranspiration under all-sky conditions in the Alps