Francesco Leopardi
Francesco Leopardi was born in Assisi, Italy, on July 13, 1995. He obtained his Master’s degree in Building Engineering from the University of Perugia. In 2023, he began his Ph.D. within the International Doctoral Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering, a joint initiative between the University of Perugia and the Italian National Research Council – Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection (CNR-IRPI).
His research focuses on hydrological modeling of river discharge and runoff using satellite observations. During his doctoral studies, he has participated in several national and international conferences, including the EGU General Assembly 2024, EGU General Assembly 2025, and the Living Planet Symposium 2025.
Sessions
Climate change alters familiar environments and impacts our daily lives. In this circumstances it essential to monitor river discharge for a range of activities, including water resource management and flood risk reduction. However, in-situ stations have some limitations, such as low density, incomplete temporal coverage, and data access delays, which make continuous spatio-temporal monitoring of river discharge a challenging task. For this reason, researchers and space agencies have developed new satellite-based methods for estimating runoff and river discharge. Among these, the European Space Agency (ESA) has funded the STREAM (SaTellite-based Runoff Evaluation And Mapping) and STREAM-NEXT projects, which exploit satellite observations of precipitation, soil moisture, terrestrial water storage, altimetric water level, and snow cover fraction within a conceptually parsimonious model, STREAM, to estimate runoff and river discharge.
Applied to more than 40 basins worldwide including the largest basins in the world (e.g., Mississippi-Missouri, Amazon, Danube, Murray-Darling, and Niger), the STREAM model has shown good ability to replicate observed river discharge, even in basins with a high degree of human pressure where flow is regulated by dams, reservoirs, or floodplains, or in heavily irrigated areas. The positive results achieved have paved the way for regionalizing the parameters of the STREAM model to make it applicable on a global scale. Through the calibration of the STREAM model on the 40 pilot catchments, it was possible to obtain a large set of parameters that were linked, through specific relationships, to various features including climate, soil characteristics, vegetation and topographic attributes. This approach yielded regionalized STREAM parameters. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of the STREAM runoff and river discharge estimates, derived from regionalized parameters, across a diverse range of basins. To this end, a comparative analysis will be conducted between observed and simulated river discharge, as well as between simulated and modeled land surface runoff estimates.
This contribution aims to demonstrate how the use of readily available information processed through a conceptual regionalized hydrological model can bring benefits in estimating river discharge and producing runoff maps, even in basins characterised by intricate interactions between natural and anthropogenic phenomena.