Future Flows Climate: an ensemble of 1-km climate change projections for hydrological application in Great Britain

Abstract

Abstract. The dataset Future Flows Climate was developed as part of the project "Future Flows and Groundwater Levels" to provide a consistent set of climate change projections for the whole of Great Britain at both space and time resolutions appropriate for hydrological applications, and to enable climate change uncertainty and climate variability to be accounted for in the assessment of their possible impacts on the environment.Future Flows Climate is derived from the Hadley Centre's ensemble projection HadRM3-PPE that is part of the basis of UKCP09 and includes projections in available precipitation (water available to hydrological processes after snow and ice storages have been accounted for) and potential evapotranspiration. It corresponds to an 11-member ensemble of transient projections from January 1950 to December 2098, each a single realisation from a different variant of HadRM3. Data are provided on a 1-km grid over the HadRM3 land areas at a daily (available precipitation) and monthly (PE) time step as netCDF files.Because systematic biases in temperature and precipitation were found between HadRM3-PPE and gridded temperature and precipitation observations for the 1962-1991 period, a monthly bias correction procedure was undertaken, based on a linear correction for temperature and a quantile-mapping correction (using the gamma distribution) for precipitation followed by a spatial downscaling. Available precipitation was derived from the bias-corrected precipitation and temperature time series using a simple elevation-dependant snow-melt model. Potential evapotranspiration time series were calculated for each month using the FAO-56 Penman-Monteith equations and bias-corrected temperature, cloud cover, relative humidity and wind speed from HadRM3-PPE along with latitude of the grid and the day of the year.Future Flows Climate is freely available for non-commercial use under certain licensing conditions. It is the dataset used to generate Future Flows Hydrology, an ensemble of transient projections of daily river flow and monthly groundwater time series for representative river basins and boreholes in Great Britain.

Assessing the Impact of Climate Change and Extreme Value Uncertainty to Extreme Flows across Great Britain

“…Future Flows Hydrology is derived from Future Flows Climate [33], an 11-member ensemble of transient climate projections for Great Britain (bias-corrected and downscaled on a 1-km grid) based on HadRM3-PPE-UK, developed as part of the derivation of the UKCP09 scenarios [34]. HadRM3-PPE-UK was designed to represent parameter uncertainty in climate change projections through a parameter variant experiment and was run under the SRES A1B emissions scenario (see [19] for details of the climate model perturbations).…”

Use of very high resolution climate model data for hydrological modelling: baseline performance and future flood changes

“…This generally required some form of further downscaling, particularly for precipitation data, before use for hydrological modelling, with the downscaling sometimes being combined with bias-correction. For example, Prudhomme et al (2012) used quantile-mapping to downscale and bias-correct 25km RCM precipitation to 1km. However, such adjustments have to be applied with care.…”

A Resilience-Based Methodology for Improved Water Resources Adaptation Planning under Deep Uncertainty with Real World Application

“…These were used to generate future flow projections for the region's major contributing rivers and reservoirs (Roach et al 2015). The Future Flows project (Prudhomme et al 2012) utilises the projections derived from the UKCP09 regional climate models (RCMs) from the Met Office Hadley Centre. They provide 11 plausible realisations (all assumed equally likely) of river flows at various river gauging stations across the UK accounting for the impact of climate change to 2100 under a Medium emission scenario.…”