Abstract
Large data sets used to study the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the 2013/14 floods in the UK are provided. The data consist of perturbed initial conditions simulations using the Weather@Home regional climate modelling framework. Two different base conditions, Actual, including atmospheric conditions (anthropogenic greenhouse gases and human induced aerosols) as at present and Natural, with these forcings all removed are available. The data set is made up of 13 different ensembles (2 actual and 11 natural) with each having more than 7500 members. The data is available as NetCDF V3 files representing monthly data within the period of interest (1st Dec 2013 to 15th February 2014) for both a specified European region at a 50 km horizontal resolution and globally at N96 resolution. The data is stored within the UK Natural and Environmental Research Council Centre for Environmental Data Analysis repository.
Highlights
Background & SummaryIn a warming world, it is increasingly important for decision-making and investments at the national and local scale to take into account changing patterns of weather and in particular extreme weather and climate-related events
Focusing on precipitation during the winter 2013/2014 in Southern England we found that the likelihood of extreme precipitation similar to the observed event has increased by 0–160% depending on which of the naturalised Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) patterns, as described later, are used
In terms of information useful to decision-making, this means that while anthropogenic climate change does not decrease the likelihood of extreme precipitation, the change in frequency is not so large that one could speak of a new normal
Summary
It is increasingly important for decision-making and investments at the national and local scale to take into account changing patterns of weather and in particular extreme weather and climate-related events. While general information about climate change projections is widely available, decision-makers around the world are lacking information about how climate change may affect extreme weather events in their location. Having such information is valuable in the aftermath of extreme and record breaking events, when politicians and policy officials are granted license to pursue more climate resilient policies and investments. The primary analysis of this data[3] provides presumably the first truly end-to-end extreme event attribution study (building on previous work4) by estimating how the increase in risk due to anthropogenic climate change propagates from an increase in the overall risk of extreme precipitation in Southern England in January and the associated changes in the atmospheric circulation to high river flows in the river Thames and inundated floodplains around Kingston. All analyses undertaken with help of this data have focused so far on extreme precipitation in the UK, the regional data covers the whole of Europe and recovers daily data for a number of variables including mean sea level pressure (mslp), wind speed and geopotential height rendering it an ideal tool to understand the drivers and atmospheric processes behind other unusual weather events of which an unusually high number occurred in the first quarter of 2014, globally and in Europe
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