Abstract
In winter 2013/14 a succession of storms hit the UK leading to record rainfall and flooding in many regions including south east England. In the Thames river valley there was widespread flooding, with clean-up costs of over £1 billion. There was no observational precedent for this level of rainfall. Here we present analysis of a large ensemble of high-resolution initialised climate simulations to show that this event could have been anticipated, and that in the current climate there remains a high chance of exceeding the observed record monthly rainfall totals in many regions of the UK. In south east England there is a 7% chance of exceeding the current rainfall record in at least one month in any given winter. Expanding our analysis to some other regions of England and Wales the risk increases to a 34% chance of breaking a regional record somewhere each winter.
Highlights
In winter 2013/14 a succession of storms hit the UK leading to record rainfall and flooding in many regions including south east England
The system uses the Hadley Centre global climate model, HadGEM3-GC218, at high resolution compared to most current climate prediction models: 60 km atmosphere and 0.25° ocean
We find many unprecedented monthly rainfall totals for south east England in the model simulations
Summary
In winter 2013/14 a succession of storms hit the UK leading to record rainfall and flooding in many regions including south east England. We present analysis of a large ensemble of high-resolution initialised climate simulations to show that this event could have been anticipated, and that in the current climate there remains a high chance of exceeding the observed record monthly rainfall totals in many regions of the UK. Using the large ensemble of simulations from decadal climate prediction studies provides considerably more realisations than are available from the recent observational period In this case the model provides over 100 times more winters than have been observed over the current climate period 1981–2015 (‘Methods’). For south east England we find a 7% chance of a rainfall total greater than the current observed record in at least one month of a given winter
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