Bad weather arriving in Italy: intense thunderstorms and storms between Thursday and Saturday

An Atlantic flow ready to break into Italy between Thursday and Saturday, bringing intense and localized thunderstorms with widespread rain. This is indicated by the analyzes of TempoItalia.it meteorologists on the Icon model of the German meteorological service Dwd, according to which the Atlantic air will come into contact with masses full of humidity and energy accumulated in recent days, generating short but violent showers.

The start is expected between the night and the early hours of Thursday 21 August, with the first storm nuclei in the western Alps, upper Piedmont, the Lombardy pre-Alpine belt and Alto Adige. Western Liguria and the hinterland should be involved in the same phase. During the day, the instability will extend to the plains of Piedmont and Lombardy, but also to Liguria, with offshoots towards Corsica and western Sardinia. In the evening it will also involve Triveneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia.

Friday 22nd is the day on which the model insists most: the axis of the phenomena will stretch from the western Alps to Friuli Venezia Giulia, affecting Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, western Emilia-Romagna and Liguria. The novelty will be the descent towards the South, with the instability reaching northern Tuscany, the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and the Tyrrhenian Sea up to Sardinia and Corsica. In this area it will be possible to trigger self-regenerating storms, a phenomenon whereby new cells form repeatedly over the same area, fed by the same incoming flow, with rain that persists for hours in a limited territory.

On Saturday the configuration will move towards the Adriatic side: Friuli Venezia Giulia, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, then Marche, Abruzzo and Molise, with the central Apennines as the main trigger. The internal areas of Campania and Basilicata are also involved, while further south convective nuclei are formed between Tyrrhenian Calabria and north-eastern Sicily.

Among the consequences, even medium-sized hailstorms may occur, while the development of cloudbursts cannot be ruled out in some areas. To complicate the picture, the soil has been dry for months, which absorbs water worse than damp soil and favors runoff to the surface: the risk will be sudden flooding even where rain, in other conditions, would not have created problems.