Climate Change Scenarios

The description of the future climate is based on the four different emissions scenarios published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [www.ipcc.ch] and used in the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP02) [www.ukcip.org.uk/scenarios]. The four climate change scenarios (Low, Medium-Low, Medium-high and High) are based on the Hadley Centre climate model plus higher resolution regional models to simulate changes over a grid with a 50km resolution.

Changes in precipitation and average seasonal temperature shifts for the virtual region in Flood Ranger have been further refined for each scenario using the analysis published by the East Midlands Sustainable Development Round Table on the Potential Impacts of Climate Change (2000) (UKCIP).

In Flood Ranger the following climate change parameters undergo changes every ten years across the century in accordance with the climate change scenario selected:

• climate change parameters: these include warming of air temperature; winter upland (>200m) precipitation; winter lowland (<200m) precipitation; summer upland (>200m) precipitation; summer lowland (<200m) precipitation; rainstorm events; sea level rise; and storm surges