Adaptation
Providing practical adaptation advice to both government departments and commercial customers.
Due to the amount of CO2 that has already been emitted in the atmosphere, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are committed to a degree of climate change. Therefore, mitigation cannot be the only focus when considering climate change; mitigation must be considered alongside adaptation measures. We work with customers to identify how their assets and businesses are sensitive to weather now, with a view to assessing how they may be impacted by future climate change. We use the most up-to-date climate model projections and science from the Met Office Hadley Centre and tailor these outputs to our customers' needs. We work closely with many other areas of research including the Climate change mitigation advice group who provide policy-relevant information on avoiding dangerous climate change and its impacts.
We use a range of tools when carrying out projects:
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Probabilistic and multi-model projections including UKCP09, Seamless Ensemble Prediction and the IPCC AR4 ensemble.
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Risk analysis.
Key aims
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To work with a wide variety of customers to identify their weather and climate sensitivities.
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To provide the most up-to-date and robust climate research on mitigation and adaptation advice.
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To carry out risk assessments of baseline and future climate risks.
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To communicate climate science to the general public.
Current projects
Evolution of hail storms over Europe in a changing climate
This work will assess the ability of the current hail model to reproduce observed hail storms, and then improvements will be made systematically to the hail model. The improved model will then be used to assess the possible impacts of climate change on hail storms, particularly their frequency of occurrence, the sizes of the hail stones, and where and when they occur. The project is funded by the AXA Research Fund and will be undertaken in close collaboration with a European hail expert.
Climate change and the East Midlands economy
Working with the East Midlands Development Agency (emda), the objective of this project is to identify what the possible impacts of climate change may be on their regional economy.
International Dimensions of Climate Change
This project is part of the Foresight Programme and involves working across government to examine how global and regional climate changes may affect UK imports of commodities and physical resources.
Climate risk assessment on the future resilience of the UK's electricity network
Following on from work undertaken in Energy Phase 2 (EP2), the objective of this project is to investigate whether the risk of the electricity network to faults caused by weather could be impacted in the future due to a changing climate.
