New publication about extreme summer rainfall in England and Wales

A new publication by our Science Coordinator, Dr Friederike Otto, has been published in Climatic Change about our recent research into extreme summer rainfall events in England and Wales as an example for probabilistic event attribution.

In the summer of 2007 England and Wales experienced very heavy flooding. Summer precipitation and subsequently flooding are harder to model than winter or autumn rainfall and this recent publication highlights this again. We look at different possible drivers of high precipitation in summer and do not find a conclusive signal apart for the July precipitation which might have been exacerbated due to anthropogenic forcing. However, the focus of the paper is not so much the attribution of the extreme precipitation to external climate drivers but the quantification of the uncertainties involved in such a study. The paper is part of a special issue dedicated to exactly these issues which will soon be published in full.

Read the full article, which is open source, here.