The paper presents the flood and landslide early warning system HEWS developed by the University of Messina for the Integrated Multi-Risk Decentralised Functional Centre of Sicily (Italy). HEWS implements a methodology based on the combined use of rainfall thresholds, soil moisture modelling and quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF) to issue alert bulletins both for floods and landslide. The software Delft-FEWS has been adopted as operation platform to support the implementation of HEWS. Hide

For early warning of disasters induced by precipitation (such as floods and landslides), different kinds of rainfall thresholds are adopted, which vary from each other, on the basis on adopted hypotheses. This work briefly discusses different schemes of rainfall thresholds, focusing attention on landslide prediction, with some applications to a real case study in Calabria region (southern Italy). Hide