Durant, M. and Counsell, C. and Fung, F. and Wilby, R. (2025) How plausible are severe and extreme climate model droughts? A water supply perspective. In: Royal Meteorological Society Early Career and Student Conference 2025, 30 June - 2 July 2025, Manchester, UK. (Unpublished)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The plausibility of severe and extreme droughts outside the range of those experienced historically is critical to adapting water supply systems to climate change. Current planning practices in England and Wales take stochastically generated droughts, perturbed by mean monthly change factors from climate models to create these droughts, however there are notable drawbacks to this approach, including the plausibility of these events. Moving beyond change factors, what information from climate models and how much of it to include within climate change assessments, is integral to improving climate change assessments. The aim of this study is to quantify the plausibility of severe and extreme water supply droughts within climate models using weather types, using a system-led approach. A stochastic weather generator is developed using a Markov process, trained on the historical Met Office weather types, with sequences run through hydrological and water supply system models to determine the weather type sequences that result in severe and extreme water supply droughts. The difference between transitional probabilities in the historical sequence and the generated sequences is used as a measure of the plausibility of the generated sequences. The resulting envelope is then compared with the weather patterns contained within the United Kingdom Climate Projections 2018 Global Circulation Model ensemble to understand the plausibility and severity of the droughts within current and future time periods, generated by climate models. The results of this study could be used to improve climate change risk and vulnerability assessments, aid in adaptive planning, within bottom-up climate change assessments, and in screening climate models for inclusion within assessments, based on the pressure fields within the models, rather than simply the climate variables alone.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Other) |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | A full paper was not written for this event, but it is anticipated that it will be published as a Journal paper in due course. |
| Subjects: | Water > General Water > Water resources |
| Divisions: | Water |
| Depositing User: | Helen Stevenson |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Jul 2025 10:11 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Jul 2025 10:11 |
| URI: | http://eprints.hrwallingford.com/id/eprint/1692 |
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