UK Climate Resilience Programme Webinar Series 2022-2023
Date: 17 February 2023, 12pm-1pm (GMT)
Speakers: Richard Chandler, Clair Barnes and Chris Brierley (University College London); respondent Carol McSweeney (Met Office)
Chair: Pete Walton (UKCR)
View this webinar on YouTube
Abstract
The regional component of the 2018 UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) plays a key role in supporting the management of future climate risks to the UK. However, it is based on a limited set of climate models and hence may not sample the full range of possible futures that is consistent with current scientific understanding. In this webinar, we will present results from a UKCR project that has developed an expanded set of UK-specific projections using information from 64 different combinations of multiple global and regional climate models, derived from the EuroCORDEX ensemble (https://www.euro-cordex.net) and available to download alongside the UKCP18 regional projections in the same format. This expanded database is designed to allow a better understanding of structural uncertainty in UK climate projections, and hence to enhance the information base available to support future climate change risk assessments.
For users wanting a higher-level overview, we have also developed a ‘plot explorer’, providing precomputed analyses of historical model performance and projected change for more than 60 climate indices, alongside tools enabling the selection of ‘representative’ projections for UK-focused impacts studies.
A final output of the project is aimed at research-level users. This uses novel statistical methodology to postprocess the projections from an entire ensemble, taking account of discrepancies between the climate models and the real climate system, to produce probability distributions of seasonal and annual temperature and precipitation for the entire UK and for each of its main administrative regions. This methodology is found to resolve many of the differences between the UKCP18 and EuroCORDEX ensembles, to a large extent.
The webinar will aim to give a flavour of the results from the project. More information, including links to the data and analyses, is at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/research/eurocordex-uk.
Biographies
Richard Chandler is a Professor in the Department of Statistical Science at University College London. He has extensive experience of developing and applying statistical methods for the environmental sciences. Particular interests include the analysis of time series and space-time data, with application areas including hydrology and the impacts of climate change. Other areas of interest include the assessment of uncertainty when interpreting model outputs.
Carol McSweeney is a climate scientist at the Met Office working on assessing simulations of regional climate change and guiding their application in climate change impact studies. Her areas of expertise include regional climate prediction for developing countries; assessing reliability of climate model simulations, and the spatial and temporal characteristics of rainfall variability and extremes. Carol’s work aims to facilitate and develop the use of the Met Office Hadley Centre’s regional climate model, PRECIS, in developing regions of the world.