Italy can expect an unseasonably hot and dry summer with no significant rain until August, experts confirmed on Tuesday.
A meeting of a special drought crisis unit set up at the civil protection department updated its report of last month to add that temperatures in August should be within the norm with alternating conditions of sunny and bad weather.
However, what rain there is will be average or below normal, especially in the central-north, and insufficient to offset the water shortage Italy has suffered from since last September.
The crisis unit's report said temperatures in June and July will be well above the average of the past five years, which was already significantly higher than normal, with several extreme heat waves.
Special monitoring stations have been set up in 18 key cities to coordinate efforts to combat the extreme heat, especially for those most at risk, including the elderly and children.
The Italian government earlier this month declared a state of emergency as a precautionary measure because of the extremely low levels of lakes and rivers following an unusually dry winter.
These included setting up the crisis unit to manage the emergency with representatives from key ministries, including the environment and industry, the civil defense department and various major water authorities.
The unit has already drawn up a contingency plan which includes a TV advertising campaign to focus on ways to save both water and electricity.
Other measures in the contingency plan include building up reserve stocks of at least 350 million cubic meters of water, greater controls on water drawn from the Po River by industry and agriculture, and scheduled power outages for non-domestic use.
Italy's water shortage is the result of a sharp drop in rainfall and snow since last summer together with an unusually mild winter.
Rainfall from September through February was down by between 20% to 40% and by as much as 60% in parts of the north.
Snow in the Italian mountains last February was said to have been only a third in area of what it was in February of last year and only half the depth.
The National Research Council reported that this winter was the hottest in Italy in over 200 years, with average temperatures running 1.79°C higher than the previous hottest winter on record, 1990.
This was backed up by the Rome Meteorological Observatory which said that the average winter temperature of 14.4°C was the highest since it began taking records 225 years ago.
