Journal ArticleDOI
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000
Pardeep Pall,T. Aina,Dáithí A. Stone,Peter A. Stott,Toru Nozawa,Arno Hilberts,Dag Lohmann,Myles R. Allen +7 more
TLDR
A multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000 is presented.Abstract:
Interest in attributing the risk of damaging weather-related events to anthropogenic climate change is increasing1. Yet climate models used to study the attribution problem typically do not resolve the weather systems associated with damaging events2 such as the UK floods of October and November 2000. Occurring during the wettest autumn in England and Wales since records began in 17663, 4, these floods damaged nearly 10,000 properties across that region, disrupted services severely, and caused insured losses estimated at £1.3 billion (refs 5, 6). Although the flooding was deemed a ‘wake-up call’ to the impacts of climate change at the time7, such claims are typically supported only by general thermodynamic arguments that suggest increased extreme precipitation under global warming, but fail8, 9 to account fully for the complex hydrometeorology4, 10 associated with flooding. Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing11, 12, we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred. Results are fed into a precipitation-runoff model that is used to simulate severe daily river runoff events in England and Wales (proxy indicators of flood events). The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
A decade of weather extremes
Dim Coumou,Stefan Rahmstorf +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a review of the evidence so far, it is argued that certain events or an increase in their frequency can be linked with confidence to the human influence on climate.
Changes in climate extremes and their impacts on the natural physical environment: An overview of the IPCC SREX report
Sonia I. Seneviratne,Neville Nicholls,David R. Easterling,Clare Goodess,Shinjiro Kanae,James P. Kossin,Yiming Luo,José A. Marengo,Kathleen L. McInnes,Mohammad Rahimi,Markus Reichstein,Asgeir Sorteberg,Carolina Vera,X. Zhang +13 more
Journal ArticleDOI
Perception of climate change
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of Global Warming was exceedingly small.
Journal ArticleDOI
Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health
Nick Watts,W. Neil Adger,Paolo Agnolucci,Jason J. Blackstock,Peter Byass,Wenjia Cai,Sarah Chaytor,Tim Colbourn,Matthew Collins,Adam Cooper,Peter M. Cox,Joanna Depledge,Paul Drummond,Paul Ekins,Victor Galaz,Delia Grace,Hilary Graham,Michael Grubb,Andy Haines,Ian Hamilton,Alasdair Hunter,Xujia Jiang,Moxuan Li,Ilan Kelman,Lu Liang,Melissa C. Lott,Robert Lowe,Yong Luo,Georgina M. Mace,Mark A. Maslin,Maria Nilsson,Tadj Oreszczyn,Steve Pye,Tara Quinn,My Svensdotter,Sergey Venevsky,Koko Warner,Bing Xu,Jun Yang,Yongyuan Yin,Chaoqing Yu,Qiang Zhang,Peng Gong,Hugh Montgomery,Anthony Costello +44 more
TL;DR: The 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change has been formed to map out the impacts of climate change, and the necessary policy responses, in order to ensure the highest attainable stand-alone position on climate change.
Journal ArticleDOI
Flood risk and climate change: global and regional perspectives
Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz,Shinjiro Kanae,Sonia I. Seneviratne,John Handmer,Neville Nicholls,Pascal Peduzzi,Reinhard Mechler,Laurens M. Bouwer,Nigel W. Arnell,Katherine J Mach,Robert Muir-Wood,R. Brakenridge,Wolfgang Kron,Gerardo Benito,Yasushi Honda,Kiyoshi Takahashi,Boris Sherstyukov +16 more
TL;DR: In this article, a holistic perspective on changing rainfall-driven flood risk is provided for the late 20th and early 21st centuries, which includes an assessment of changes in flood risk in seven of the regions considered in the recent IPCC SREX report.
References
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Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Susan Solomon,Dahe Qin,Martin R. Manning,Melinda Marquis,Kristen Averyt,Melinda M.B. Tignor,H. L. Miller,Z. Chen +7 more
TL;DR: The first volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report as mentioned in this paper was published in 2007 and covers several topics including the extensive range of observations now available for the atmosphere and surface, changes in sea level, assesses the paleoclimatic perspective, climate change causes both natural and anthropogenic, and climate models for projections of global climate.
Journal ArticleDOI
The ERA‐40 re‐analysis
S. Uppala,Per Kållberg,Adrian Simmons,U. Andrae,V. da Costa Bechtold,M. Fiorino,J. K. Gibson,J. Haseler,A. Hernandez,Graeme Kelly,Xiaoming Li,Kazutoshi Onogi,Sami Saarinen,N. Sokka,Richard P. Allan,Richard P. Allan,Erik Andersson,Klaus Arpe,Magdalena Balmaseda,Anton Beljaars,L. van de Berg,Jean Bidlot,Niels Bormann,S. Caires,Frédéric Chevallier,A. Dethof,M. Dragosavac,Michael Fisher,Manuel Fuentes,Stefan Hagemann,Elías Hólm,Brian J. Hoskins,Lars Isaksen,Peter A. E. M. Janssen,Roy L. Jenne,A. P. McNally,Jean-François Mahfouf,Jean-Jacques Morcrette,Nick Rayner,Roger Saunders,P. Simon,Andreas Sterl,Kevin E. Trenberth,A. Untch,Drasko Vasiljevic,Pedro Viterbo,John S. Woollen +46 more
TL;DR: ERA-40 is a re-analysis of meteorological observations from September 1957 to August 2002 produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in collaboration with many institutions as mentioned in this paper.
A physically based, variable contributing area model of basin hydrology
Mike Kirkby,Keith Beven +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a hydrological forecasting model is presented that attempts to combine the important distributed effects of channel network topology and dynamic contributing areas with the advantages of simple lumped parameter basin models.
Journal ArticleDOI
A physically based, variable contributing area model of basin hydrology / Un modèle à base physique de zone d'appel variable de l'hydrologie du bassin versant
Keith Beven,Mike Kirkby +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a hydrological forecasting model is presented that combines the important distributed effects of channel network topology and dynamic contributing areas with the advantages of simple luminescence.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Improved In Situ and Satellite SST Analysis for Climate
TL;DR: A weekly 1° spatial resolution optimum interpolation (OI) sea surface temperature (SST) analysis has been produced at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) using both in situ and satellite data from November 1981 to the present as mentioned in this paper.