SPHERA, a new Italian convection-permitting regional reanalysis: improving heavy-rainfall representation and describing hail-prone environments

Extreme weather events related to deep convection are high-impact critical phenomena whose reliable numerical simulation is still challenging. High-resolution (convection-permitting) modeling setups allow to switch off physical parameterizations accountable for substantial errors in convection representation. A new convection-permitting reanalysis over Italy (SPHERA) has been produced at ARPAE to enhance the representation and understanding of extreme weather situations. SPHERA is obtained through a dynamical downscaling of the global reanalysis ERA5 using the non-hydrostatic model COSMO at 2.2 km grid spacing over 1995-2020. This thesis aims to verify the expectations placed on SPHERA by analyzing two weather phenomena that are particularly challenging to simulate: heavy rainfall and hail. A quantitative statistical analysis over Italy during 2003-2017 for daily and hourly precipitation is presented to compare the performance of SPHERA with its driver ERA5 considering the national network of rain gauges as reference. Furthermore, two extreme precipitation events are deeply investigated. SPHERA shows a quantitative added skill over ERA5 for moderate to severe and rapid accumulations in terms of adherence to the observations, higher detailing of the spatial fields, and more precise temporal matching. These results prompted the use of SPHERA for the investigation of hailstorms, for which the combination of multiple information is crucial to reduce the substantial uncertainties permeating their understanding. A proxy for hail is developed by combining hail-favoring environmental numerical predictors with observations of ESWD hail reports and satellite overshooting top detections. The procedure is applied to the extended summer season (April-October) of 2016-2018 over the whole SPHERA spatial domain. The results indicate maximum hail likelihood over pre-Alpine regions and the northern Adriatic sea around 15 UTC in June-July, in agreement with recent European hail climatologies. The method demonstrates enhanced performance in case of severe hail occurrences and the ability to separate between ambient signatures depending on hail severity.

Essays in Applied Health Economics: Evidence on Health and Health Care in Italy and UK

This thesis is the result of my experience as a PhD student taking part in the Joint Doctoral Programme at the University of York and the University of Bologna. In my thesis I deal with topics that are of particular interest in Italy and in Great Britain. Chapter 2 focuses on the empirical test of the existence of the relationship between technological profiles and market structure claimed by Sutton’s theory (1991, 1998) in the specific economic framework of hospital care services provided by the Italian National Health Service (NHS). In order to test the empirical predictions by Sutton, we identify the relevant markets for hospital care services in Italy in terms of both product and geographic dimensions. In particular, the Elzinga and Hogarty (1978) approach has been applied to data on patients’ flows across Italian Provinces in order to derive the geographic dimension of each market. Our results provide evidence in favour of the empirical predictions of Sutton. Chapter 3 deals with the patient mobility in the Italian NHS. To analyse the determinants of patient mobility across Local Health Authorities, we estimate gravity equations in multiplicative form using a Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood method, as proposed by Santos-Silva and Tenreyro (2006). In particular, we focus on the scale effect played by the size of the pool of enrolees. In most of the cases our results are consistent with the predictions of the gravity model. Chapter 4 considers the effects of contractual and working conditions on selfassessed health and psychological well-being (derived from the General Health Questionnaire) using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). We consider two branches of the literature. One suggests that “atypical” contractual conditions have a significant impact on health while the other suggests that health is damaged by adverse working conditions. The main objective of our paper is to combine the two branches of the literature to assess the distinct effects of contractual and working conditions on health. The results suggest that both sets of conditions have some influence on health and psychological well-being of employees.