Persistent drought and a series of heatwaves are draining water reserves across northern Italy, pushing the Po river toward critically low levels. The river's flow is falling toward the 200-cubic-metres-per-second threshold, and at Pontelagoscuro in the province of Ferrara, discharge dropped to just 220.4 cubic metres per second in early August.
The crisis is allowing saltwater to push more than 20 to 25 kilometres inland through the Po Delta, forcing the closure of all irrigation intakes around Porto Tolle. Water shortages across the entire Po basin were upgraded from medium to high at the end of July. Lombardy currently holds roughly 798.5 million cubic metres of water, about half the normal reserve for this time of year, while the region's major lakes sit well below their seasonal norms, according to the ANBI water observatory.
Conditions along the Po near Cremona have left unusually large sand and gravel banks visible from space, Copernicus imagery shows. The effects are reaching beyond Italy: in France's Burgundy wine region, the grape harvest has begun far earlier than usual.