Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 16, 2085–2106, 2016 www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/16/2085/2016/ doi:10.5194/nhess-16-2085-2016 © Author(s) 2016. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Climate anomalies associated with the occurrence of rockfalls at high-elevation in the Italian Alps Roberta Paranunzio1, Francesco Laio1, Marta Chiarle2, Guido Nigrelli2, and Fausto Guzzetti3 1Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy 2Research Institute for Geo-hydrological Protection, National Research Council (CNR IRPI), Torino, Italy 3Research Institute for Geo-hydrological Protection, National Research Council (CNR IRPI), Perugia, Italy Correspondence to: Roberta Paranunzio (
[email protected]) Received: 29 March 2016 – Published in Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss.: 4 April 2016 Revised: 13 July 2016 – Accepted: 22 August 2016 – Published: 12 September 2016 Abstract. Climate change is seriously affecting the 1 Introduction cryosphere in terms, for example, of permafrost thaw, al- teration of rain=snow ratio, and glacier shrinkage. There is concern about the increasing number of rockfalls at high el- The recent decades have seen a pronounced warming in evation in the last decades. Nevertheless, the exact role of global climate, primarily at high elevations and high latitudes climate parameters in slope instability at high elevation has (Schär et al., 2004). Temperature across European Alps has ◦ not been fully explored yet. In this paper, we investigate 41 increased of about 1.4 K per century over the period 1906– rockfalls listed in different sources (newspapers, technical re- 2005, which is more than double the global average (Brunetti ports, and CNR IRPI archive) in the elevation range 1500– et al., 2009) and further increases are expected according to 4200 m a.s.l.