Recent drought effects on bracciano lake water availability

Drought events are currently increasing in frequency and intensity all over the world as effect of climate change. One of the most related environmental issue is water resource scarcity, which is now becoming an emergency also for several industrialized countries in the Mediterranean area. In the summer of 2017, all Italian territory suffered from an extreme drought event that caused huge depletions of both groundwater and surface water availability. In particular, Bracciano Lake, which is one of the largest surface water resource of Central Italy, showed the largest water level drop in 50 years of observation, with a critic impact on the Lake’s ecological system. This event highlighted once again the key-role of water shortage analysis, whose main goal is studying the relationship between rainfall deficit and water resources availability. Moreover, their long-term trends need to be studied in order to find sustainable solutions for the increasing water demand of the population. In particular, in this paper, data related to time series of about 60 years have been analyzed with the aim of finding highly significant relationships between Bracciano Lake level drops at different time scales, and the SPI (Standard Precipitation Index), which is currently the most widely used hydrological drought indicator. This study aims to demonstrate that specific drought indices may be useful tools for water system management.