Research collaborations

Overview:

In addition to investigating the effect of human-induced climate change on the risk of an event like the United Kingdom floods of Autumn 2000, we are also collaborating with researchers who will use data concurrently generated by this project for other regions of the world to investigate effects on seasonal-timescale events in those regions.

Specifically, as well as returning a simulation of daily England and Wales total precipitation for the April 2000 - March 2001 period, the results uploaded back to us from participants also include concurrent simulations of other variables for that time over various other regions of the world (since the climate model being used has global coverage).

There is daily precipitation and temperature returned for the Atlantic-European, Northwest USA, South African and Indian regions, and these are illustrated in the figure below:

Also concurrently simulated are monthly precipitation, temperature, sea-level pressure, winds and land soil moisture over the whole globe.

If you are at an academic research institution and would like to use this data from our project to investigate the effects of climate change in your region, then please get in touch with us via our Message Boards.

Details of current collaborations:

• Mountain snowpack decline in western North America
• Heatwave occurrence in South Africa and India

Mountain snowpack decline in western North America
Mountain snowpack in western North America is important for storing water from the winter (when most precipitation falls) and releasing it in spring and early summer, when economic, environmental, and recreational demands for water throughout the American West are frequently greatest. It has recently been found that widespread declines in spring-time snowpack have occurred in much of the region over the period 1925-2000, and that several factors argue for a climatic role in this (Mote et al 2005).


By using precipitation and temperature data generated by the climate model simulations in this Seasonal Attribution project, and feeding it into a hydrological model, researchers can investigate the effects of human-induced climate change on mountain snowpack. The lead investigator in this collaboration is Dr Philp W. Mote in the Climate Impacts group at the University of Washington.

The figure below shows the region in the climate model over which we are outputting daily precipitation and temperature data. The actual data plotted is for average conditions (ensemble mean from Beta test) around the time of year most important to the investigation.





Heatwave occurrence in South Africa and India

Both these regions have suffered severe heatwaves recently. More details will follow.

In the meantime, here's a little movie of the type of output we have for the Indian region. Notice how summer temperatures for an Industrial climate are generally a few degrees warmer than for the corresponding Non-Industrial climate: