Detecting change in UK extreme precipitation using results from the climateprediction.net BBC climate change experiment

Abstract

We investigate a question posed by policy makers, namely, "when will changes in extreme precipitation due to climate change be detectable?" To answer this question we use climateprediction.net (CPDN) model simulations from the BBC Climate Change Experiment (CCE) over the UK. These provide us with the unique opportunity to compare 1-day extreme precipitation generated from climate altered by observed forcings (time period 1920-2000) and the SRES A1B emissions scenario (time period 2000-2080) (the Scenario) to extreme precipitation generated by a constant climate for year 1920 (the Control) for the HadCM3L General Circulation Model (GCM). We fit non-stationary Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) models to the Scenario output and compare these to stationary GEV models fit to the parallel Control. We define the time of detectable change as the time at which we would reject a hypothesis at the α = 0.05 significance level that the 20-year return level of the two runs is equal. We find that the time of detectable change depends on the season, with most model runs indicating that change to winter extreme precipitation may be detectable by the year 2010, and that change to summer extreme precipitation is not detectable by 2080. We also investigate which climate model parameters affect the weight of the tail of the precipitation distribution and which affect the time of detectable change for the winter season. We find that two climate model parameters have an important effect on the tail weight, and two others seem to affect the time of detection. Importantly, we find that climate model simulated extreme precipitation has a fundamentally different behavior to observations, perhaps due to the negative estimate of the GEV shape parameter, unlike observations which produce a slightly positive (∼0.0-0.2) estimate.

Inferences on weather extremes and weather-related disasters: a review of statistical methods

“…With respect to return periods or the chance for crossing pre-defined thresholds we found only rarely examples of "Class 0". In most cases "Class 1" uncertainty information is given: Feng and Nadarajah (2007), Della-Marta et al (2009), Fowler et al (2010), Wehner (2010 and Lucio et al (2010). However, we found that "Class 2" uncertainty information is lacking almost completely.…”

“…Brown et al (2008) essentially follow the same approach for extreme daily temperatures over the period 1950-2004. Fowler et al (2010 estimate GEV distributions with linear changing location parameters and apply this technique to UK extreme precipitation simulations over the period .…”

“…For examples of stationarity tests please refer to Feng et al (2007), Diermanse et al (2010), Fowler et al (2010), Furió andMeneu (2011), Villarini et al (2011) and Rea et al (2011).…”

“…- Fowler et al (2010) evaluate 8 GEV models, both stationary and non-stationary. For choosing the most appropriate model they use the AIC criterion.…”

Very extreme seasonal precipitation in the NARCCAP ensemble: model performance and projections

“…MS50F, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA e-mail: mfwehner@lbl.gov Schliep et al 2010;Fowler et al 2010). A typical methodology to arrive at a GEV description of the tails is to first form a distribution of the ''block maxima'' extracted from all of the values.…”