Abstract
Extreme precipitation events (EPEs) are meteorological phenomena of major concern for the densely populated regions of northern and central Italy. Although statistically rare, they tend to be recurrent in autumn and share common characteristics in the large-scale dynamical evolution responsible for their generation. Past studies on EPEs have reported, as the main triggering factor, a meridionally elongated upper-level trough embedded in an incoming Rossby wave packet. In this respect, we show how the meteorological conditions leading to the devastating 1994 Piedmont flood represent a typical flow evolution for this type of extreme events. Exploiting the systematic classification of EPEs recently published by the authors and taking advantage of a new observational dataset, this article revisits the role of the large-scale flow on this and similar cases of past EPEs.