The Vibo Valentia flood and MSG rainfall evaluation

In the Mediterranean area, flash-floods in small catchments are mainly due to deep convective rainfalls which show both large spatial and temporal variability. For this reason the reconstruction of the ground rainfall field is difficult and the use of rain gauges can prove poor to depict convective events from a hydrological point of view. The geostationary satellite MSG is a very important tool for monitoring the dynamic evolution of cloud structures above the European area. In the infrared window many algorithms have been proposed to relate the brightness temperature of the top of the convective cloud with rainfall. To explore more possible applications of Meteosat image analysis, in evaluating areal rainfall in small basins, a very deep convective event was analysed, which hit Vibo Valentia on 3 July 2006. Starting from this deep convective event, the paper explores new possible relations between some characteristics of infrared isotherm images and rainfall.