Extreme weather events represent serious risks for human activities and infrastructures. In particular hazards such as floods and droughts are one of the main challenges of the 21st century with significant societal and economic implications.

The intensification of extreme weather events (strong winds, thunderstorms and snowstorms) put a strain on the continuity of service of the Italian electrical grid due mainly to ice and snow overloads, storms and lightning phenomena.The aim of this work is to assess potential changes in precipitation extremes that would have serious impacts over Mediterranean basin with focus over Italian peninsula. To this aim, 5 different RCMs outputs have been analyzed. These climatic simulations are provided by Med-CORDEX project (https://www.medcordex.eu/).

The horizontal resolution of these 5 RCMs if 0.44° (about 50 km). For each model the precipitation was bias-corrected by using EOBS, a dataset of climatological gridded daily precipitation at 25 km resolution, as reference data.To investigate the change of climatic signal, a subset of standard indices defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 2009) Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) was considered.A deep analysis of the results shows that an increase of intensity and frequency of extreme events is likely, but a certain degree of uncertainty has been found in the assessing the regions that will be more likely affected, especially in short term period (2021-2050).

Considering the effects of these climatic changes on the electric system, an increase of electric failures is expected. A reduction of precipitations and an increase of the length of dry spells has also been obtained leading to a decrease of hydroelectric power generation and to a scarcity of water for the cooling of thermoelectric power plants.