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Past and future climate change in the context of memorable seasonal extremes

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-09, 12:34 authored by Tom Matthews, Donal Mullan, Robert WilbyRobert Wilby, Ciaran Broderick, Conor Murphy
© 2016 The Authors. It is thought that direct personal experience of extreme weather events could result in greater public engagement and policy response to climate change. Based on this premise, we present a set of future climate scenarios for Ireland communicated in the context of recent, observed extremes. Specifically, we examine the changing likelihood of extreme seasonal conditions in the long-term observational record, and explore how frequently such extremes might occur in a changed Irish climate according to the latest model projections. Over the period (1900-2014) records suggest a greater than 50-fold increase in the likelihood of the warmest recorded summer (1995), whilst the likelihood of the wettest winter (1994/95) and driest summer (1995) has respectively doubled since 1850. The most severe end-of-century climate model projections suggest that summers as cool as 1995 may only occur once every ~7 years, whilst winters as wet as 1994/95 and summers as dry as 1995 may increase by factors of ~8 and ~10 respectively. Contrary to previous research, we find no evidence for increased wintertime storminess as the Irish climate warms, but caution that this conclusion may be an artefact of the metric employed. It is hoped that framing future climate scenarios in the context of extremes from living memory will help communicate the scale of the challenge climate change presents, and in so doing bridge the gap between climate scientists and wider society.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Climate Risk Management

Volume

11

Pages

37 - 52

Citation

MATTHEWS, T.K.R. ...et al., 2016. Past and future climate change in the context of memorable seasonal extremes. Climate Risk Management, 11, pp. 37-52.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-01-19

Publication date

2016-02-04

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

eISSN

2212-0963

Language

  • en