Graduate School in Physics and Astrophysics ------------------------------------------- ANNUAL REPORT ------------------------------------------- Fill with a text editor (without TAB or formatting) Repeat fields for each course as necessary. ------------------------------------------- name: Sara Rubinetti email: sara.rubinetti@unito.it ciclo: XXX year completed (1,2 or 3):3 supervisor: Prof. Carla Taricco ------------------------------------------- UNDERGRADUATE COURSES (Laurea Magistrale) (only completed courses, with examination passed in the year) title: Fisica della materia allo stato fluido e di plasma teacher: Prof. Andrea Mignone hours: 48 ----------------------------------------- CONFERENCES, WORKSHOP (only those attended in the current year) title: "Measuring, Modelling and Predicting Marine Environments: State of the Art and Challenges" (THEMES 2016 scientific workshop) place: Venezia (Italia) webpage:http://www.dais.unive.it/~themes/themes_2016/index.html days:3 (November 23, 2016 - November 25, 2016) talk or poster (Y/N): Y (talk) title:European Geoscience Union (EGU) General Assembly 2017 place: Vienna (Austria) webpage: http://www.egu2017.eu/ days: 5; April 24, 2017 - April 28, 2017 talk or poster (Y/N): Y (poster) title: scientific workshop "PRISMA (Prima Rete Italiana per la Sorveglianza sistematica di Meteore e Atmosfera) DAY" place: Firenze (Italia) webpage: http://www.prisma.inaf.it/ days: 1 (May 16, 2017) talk or poster (Y/N): Y (talk) --------------------------------------------------- Research activity/Publications in the current year (max characters 2500) My PhD project has been focused on the study of natural climatic variability in the Mediterranean area and of the influence of solar activity on terrestrial climate. Concerning the first part of this year, I completed the study of the North Italian hydrological variability on decadal scale, that we previously demonstrated to be a variability mode persistent over the last millennia. I optimized the forecasting algorithms based on autoregressive and neural network models in order to apply them to the prediction of the decadal-scale hydrological variations over the Po river basin (reference 1). Moreover, thanks to the analysis of discharge records of many European rivers I demonstrated that the decadal variability characterizes a wider region with respect to the Po valley. I had also the opportunity to perform the accurate data analysis of a new climatic record, covering the last interglacial period, based on the climatic proxy delta-O18 measured in a stalagmite from Guatemala: this series provided precious information about Central American hydroclimate variability during the last 9,200 years (reference 2). My research activity during the second part of this year consisted in the detection of the centennial and multi-centennial solar activity variations through the gamma activity measurement of cosmogenic radioisotopes in meteorites (fallen in the last centuries) at the underground Laboratory of Monte dei Cappuccini (OATo-INAF). I analyzed the spectra of two fragments of the meteorite Gebel Kamil (fallen before the 18th century). Moreover, I collaborated on the development of the TITAN software, based on analytical procedures which improve the selectivity of the HPGe-NaI detectors coincidence (reference 3). Our dataset of the cosmogenic radioisotope Ti44 measurements has been used to validate many reconstructions of the solar activity variations in the past, proposed by other authors (references 4,5). 1) Rubinetti S., Taricco C., Alessio S.M., Zanchettin D., Rubino A. and Mancuso S. Robust decadal prediction of Po River discharges obtained by two independent statistical methods, Climate Research, 2017, submitted 2)Winter A., Zanchettin D., Lachniet M., Vieten R., Ljunqqvist F.C., Pausata F.S.R, Miller T., Rubino A., Taricco C., Rubinetti S. and Cheng H. Abrupt onset of a persistent active Central American Monsoon at ~9,200 years BP, Nature Geosciences, 2017, submitted 3) Gardiol D., Barghini D., Colombetti P., Taricco C., Mancuso S., Rubinetti S. and Di Martino M. Improvement of the extraction method of faint signals in gamma-activity measurements of meteorites, The European Physical Journal Plus, 132(6)),269, 2017 4) Asvestari E., Usoskin I.G., Kovaltsov G.A., Owens M.J., Krivova N.A., Rubinetti S. and Taricco C. Assessment of different sunspot number series using the cosmogenic isotope 44Ti in meteorites. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 467(2), 1608-1613, 2017 5)Mancuso S., Taricco C., Colombetti P., Rubinetti S., Sinha N. and Bhandari N. Long-term evolution of the heliospheric magnetic field intensity inferred from cosmogenic 44Ti activity in meteorites, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2017, under revision BE AWARE: research activity and Pubs are not evaluated as didactic credits, but are requested to trace the PhD students' career