Multi‐model ensemble estimates of climate change impacts on UK seasonal precipitation extremes

Fowler, Hayley J.; Ekström, Marie

doi:10.1002/joc.1827

Cited by 214 publications

(197 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Fowler & Kilsby (2007) noted that downscaled model output for northern England indicated an increase of 20 to 30% in mean monthly rainfall in winter (November-March), with a reduction of up to 50% in summer (May-September). Fowler & Ekström (2009) provided multi-model ensemble estimates of the impact of climate change on UK seasonal precipitation extremes. Extreme precipitation seems likely to increase across the UK in winter, spring and autumn by 5 to 30%.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing temperature and rainfall gradients in the British Uplands

Burt¹,

Holden²

2010

Clim. Res.

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Climate change is likely to be experienced differently at higher elevations than in lowland areas. Observations of recent change can increase understanding of how changes will be realised. We examined changes in temperature lapse rates and rainfall gradients between pairs of stations, lowland and upland, across the UK. Seasonal and annual changes were investigated, because there may well be shorter-term changes which are not reflected in the overall annual average. Significant changes in both temperature and rainfall were observed, but the pattern of changes was spatially and seasonally variable across the UK. In general, temperature changes were stronger in winter than in summer, and minima rose more than maxima in the uplands, whereas the changes were similar between minima and maxima in the lowlands. Most (but not all) upland stations showed significant increases in rainfall totals in winter that were greater than those experienced in the nearby lowlands. However, variations in seasonal trends of lapse rates and rainfall gradients are sufficiently large to warrant concern about existing climate change projections and the downscaling of regional and global climate models. Specifically, analysis at an annual time scale may mask important seasonal patterns. For countries where the data network is dominated by lowland stations but a significant proportion of the landscape is upland, this poses a problem for estimating temperature change over a large proportion of the landscape. Given the lack of a consistent pattern of changes, we advocate an extension of climate monitoring in the uplands in order to detail ongoing climate change in the different upland areas.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing temperature and rainfall gradients in the British Uplands

Burt¹,

Holden²

2010

Clim. Res.

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“…As it efficiently reduces (random) variations in the estimates of parameters of the extreme value distributions at individual locations (or gridboxes) that result from large spatial variability of heavy precipitation, it represents a straightforward tool for 'weighting' data from neighbouring gridboxes within the estimation procedure. The HW regional frequency analysis has already been incorporated in the evaluation of precipitation extremes in climate models over the UK (Fowler et al, , 2007 as well as for the construction of their future scenarios Fowler and Ekström, 2009). A similar regional approach to modelling precipitation extremes in climate model simulations, which incorporates also non-stationarity of the model parameters, was developed by Hanel et al (2009) and applied in the Rhine River basin.…”

Section: Regional and At-site Models For Heavy Precipitation 1471mentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of regional and at‐site approaches to modelling probabilities of heavy precipitation

Kyselý¹,

Gaál²,

Picek³

2011

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Several approaches to estimating distributions of precipitation extremes are compared by means of simulation experiments, and their applications into observed data in the Czech Republic are evaluated. Regional frequency models, which take into account data in fixed or flexible 'regions' when fitting a distribution at any site, lead to estimates with much smaller errors compared to a single-site analysis, and efficiently reduce random and climatologically irrelevant variations in the estimates of the model parameters and high quantiles. The region-of-influence (ROI) methodology with a built-in regional homogeneity test is recognized as a useful approach, with the model based on proximity of sites outperforming the Hosking-Wallis regional frequency analysis. Comparison of estimates of the return period of a heavy precipitation event on 24 June 2009, which triggered a disastrous local flash flood, illustrates that the at-site analysis leads to unrealistic and extremely uncertain estimates that strongly depend on whether or not a single outlying observation is involved in the sample, while all regional methods yield return periods in the same order of several hundreds of years, notwithstanding whether the 2009 data are included in the sample. The ROI method may be found useful for modelling probabilities of other meteorological variables, extremes of which are strongly influenced by sampling variability, and may also represent an efficient tool for 'smoothing' random variations in the estimates of model parameters and high quantiles of precipitation in high-resolution regional climate model simulations.

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“…Fowler and Ekström, 2009;Herrera et al, 2010;Buishand, 2011, 2012;Rajczak et al, 2013;Bartholy et al, 2015;Danandeh Mehr and Kahya, 2016). Although growing attention has been given to studies at sub-daily timescales in recent years, the complexity of physical processes related to sub-daily extremes (Stocker et al, 2013;Siler and Roe, 2014) and their simplification within climate model parameterizations make assessment of simulated sub-daily precipitation challenging, particularly since its validation is impaired by the lack of long and high-quality observed rainfall data series at hourly or sub-hourly timescales with sufficient spatial coverage allowing for comparison to simulated (spatial average) rainfall (Westra et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characteristics of rainfall events in regional climate model simulations for the Czech Republic

Svoboda

Hanel

Máca

et al. 2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Characteristics of rainfall events in an ensemble of 23 regional climate model (RCM) simulations are evaluated against observed data in the Czech Republic for the period 1981-2000. Individual rainfall events are identified using the concept of minimum inter-event time (MIT) and only heavy events (15 % of events with the largest event depths) during the warm season (May-September) are considered. Inasmuch as an RCM grid box represents a spatial average, the effects of areal averaging of rainfall data on characteristics of events are investigated using the observed data. Rainfall events from the RCM simulations are then compared to those from the at-site and area-average observations. Simulated number of heavy events and seasonal total precipitation due to heavy events are on average represented relatively well despite the higher spatial variation compared to observations. RCM-simulated event depths are comparable to the area-average observations, while event durations are overestimated and other characteristics related to rainfall intensity are significantly underestimated. The differences between RCM-simulated and at-site observed rainfall event characteristics are in general dominated by the biases of the climate models rather than the areal-averaging effect. Most of the rainfall event characteristics in the majority of the RCM simulations show a similar altitude-dependence pattern as in the observed data. The number of heavy events and seasonal total precipitation due to heavy events increase with altitude, and this dependence is captured better by the RCM simulations with higher spatial resolution.

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Multi‐model ensemble estimates of climate change impacts on UK seasonal precipitation extremes

Cited by 214 publications

References 67 publications

Changing temperature and rainfall gradients in the British Uplands

Changing temperature and rainfall gradients in the British Uplands

Comparison of regional and at‐site approaches to modelling probabilities of heavy precipitation

Characteristics of rainfall events in regional climate model simulations for the Czech Republic

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