The Met Office has provided regionalized climate data for the next century, based on models and scenarios, that can be used to
estimate Climate-Change effects on Britain.
UKCP
UK Climate Projections
UK Climate Projections (UKCP)
is a climate analysis tool that forms part of the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme. After the
success of UK Climate Projections 2009 (UKCP09), the UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) delivers a major upgrade to the range of UK climate
projection tools designed to help decision-makers assess their risk exposure to climate.
UKCP18 updates the probabilistic projections over land
and provides a set of high-resolution spatially-coherent future climate projections for the globe at 60km scale and for the UK at 12 km scale.
The 12km climate model has been further downscaled to 2.2km scale.
The marine projections of sea-level rise and storm surge have also been updated.
provides probabilistic projections, giving estimates of different future
climate outcomes. It comprises simulations from both the
latest Met Office Hadley Centre climate model and global climate models from around the world; and a set
of regional climate model projections on a finer scale (12km) for the UK and Europe. The global and regional
model projections offer users the ability to better explore climate variability and changes. UKCP provides as well a further set of
projections produced with a model of horizontal scale 2.2km, which represents some small scale
processes seen in the atmosphere.
The UKCP probabilistic projections provide estimations on future changes on temperatures and precipitations over Britain for the whole century,
considering several emission scenarios.
Check UKCP probabilistic results. They are available for aggregated regions such as countries, administrative regions and river basin regions.
It is not possible to give a precise prediction of how weather and climate will change years into the future so
UKCP provides ranges that aim to capture a spread of climate response based on current knowledge, and
using a particular set of methodologies developed by the Met Office and collaborators.
Thus, whilst the projections show trends towards a greater frequency of warmer weather, there will still be
the possibility of cold periods driven by the natural weather variations. The extent of future climate change
will be strongly affected by the amount of greenhouse gases that the global population chooses to emit in
future years.
The climate information products available in UKCP are:
Observations
There is a comprehensive set of observations
Observations
Observations for the UK show that the most recent decade (2008-2017) has been on average 0.3 °C
warmer than the 1981-2010 average and 0.8 °C warmer than 1961-1990. All of the top ten warmest
years have occurred since 1990.In the past few decades there has been an increase in annual average rainfall over the UK, particularly
over Scotland for which the most recent decade (2008–2017) has been on average 11% wetter than
1961–1990 and 4% wetter than 1981-2010. However, natural variations are also seen in the longer
observational record.
The observations made in the future will be dependent on both long-term climate
trends and natural variability. Observations show warmer years and increasing rainfall.
of weather and climate covering the UK,
with some of the records now extending back for more than 150 years.
These are projections of future climate that assign a probability level to different climate outcomes and are based on observations
and a suite of climate model ensembles.
Probabilistic projections
The probabilities are an indication of how much the evidence from climate models
and observations support a particular future climate outcome.
The probabilistic projections in UKCP18 are an update of those produced for UKCP09.
The median indicates the most probable outcome. There is stronger evidence that an outcome will be in the 5th to 95th percentile range than
in either the upper or lower tails of the distribution.
For any given scenario of future emissions UKCP
projects a spread in modelled outcomes, which is affected by the current understanding of climate
and how it is represented in the models, and by natural climate variations.
Global projections
The UK climate projections include data globally, enabling analysis of changes in future climate that are coherent in space and time.
Global projections
The Earth has been divided into 60km grid cells providing spatially-coherent projections.
There are 432 grid cells horizontally (west-east) and 324 grid cells vertically (north-south). Data is available
from 1900-2100 from the Met Office Hadley Centre global climate model and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5).
UKCP Global provides projections for future worlds representing a low and high emissions scenario (RCP 2.6 and RCP 8.5).
UKCP Global (60km) contains a set of 28 versions of the future. These are also called “realisations” or “members”.
The model results were downscaled to provide estimations at regional (12 km) and local (2.2 km) scales.
Regional projections
Downscaling is a method that derives local- to regional-scale (up to 100 km) information from larger-scale models or data analyses.
The regional model is able to better represent local influences.
UKCP provides
two regional downscaled projections: A regional climate model (RCM), covering the whole of Europe at a scale of 12 km; as well as
a local projection at a 2.2 km scale, covering the UK. Particularly,
the local projections are estimated using a new “Convection-Permitting” Model, which allows reducing the spatial and
temporal scales of the projections.
Marine projections
Projections for sea-level, storm surge and waves.
UKCP data is a serious and update effort to provide realible estimations of future climate in Britain. This information can and should be used to increase climate
resilience and to support decision-making. Contact us if you have any comment about how to make use of UKCP data.
We are open to collaborations!
