Climate information in the news: case studyClimate information and consensus knowledge about the climate vary too slowly to generate much news, but there weather events often create a public debate in which information from climate services could be beneficial. This article looks at a recent example. Severe weather in the UK and other areas of western Europe during the recent winter led to much media discussion of the possible association with climate change. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment of the physical basis (IPCC, 2013) provided 3 relevant conclusions:

● there is evidence that extreme precipitation and severe storm frequency in some areas has increased in the last 40 years;

● the warmer climate is expected to produce an anthropogenic increase in extremes by the end of the 21st century;

● the cause of the increases observed over the last 40 years remains unclear.

The third of these statements and the caveat “some areas” in the first are often overlooked in the media, but they are critical here: there is, as yet, no firm evidence that recent observed changes in extremes are a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. The problems of trying to attribute rare extreme events to climate change can be illustrated by looking at extremes of monthly rainfall in southern England. Figure 1 shows the wettest winter month recorded at Heathrow, for the full period of measurements taken at Heathrow.

www.clipc.eu*

Newsletter of the Climate Information Portal for Copernicus FP7 project Issue 3, June1st, 2014.*In the initial phase of the project, this site will only contain information about the project.

The CLIPC newsletter provides a snapshot of activities in the project to facilitate communication with users, stakeholders and associated projects.

In this issue:• Climate information in the news: case study• Sentinel Launch• Meetings

Figure 1: the wettest winter month recorded at Heathrow, for the full period of measurements taken at Heathrow.

A Climate Information Portal for

CLIPC at a glance:Start: 1st December, 2013Duration: 36 monthsLead: STFC (www.stfc.ac.uk) Web: www.clipc.euBudget: €6millionLead group: Centre for Environmental Data Archival (www.ceda.ac.uk) PI: Martin JuckesFP7 id: 607418Collaborative ProjectSPA.2013.1.1-04:Provision of access to simulated and observed climate datasets and climate indicator toolbox

Partners:UK STFC Magellium Ltd. University of Reading UK Met Office British Oceanographic Data CentreNetherlands Dutch Met Office Alterra MarisGermany T.U. Dortmund University Potsdam Inst. for Climate Climate Service CentreFrance IPSL CERFACS TECFinland Met Office Environment Agency (SYKE)Sweden SMHI Linköping UniversityNorway Met OfficeItaly CMCCSpain University of BarcelonaInternational Joint Research Centre

June, 2014

CLIPC will have two interlocked themes:

Meetings

Contact CLIPC:www.clipc.euPI: Martin Juckes (martin.juckes@stfc.ac.uk)Project manager: Sarah Callaghan (sarah.callaghan@stfc.ac.uk)

Name of event Date of event Place of event Event website

4th CCI Collocation Meeting

4th February 2014

Frascati, Italy

http://46.137.76.174/?q=node/267

This meeting was to present the AR5 WG1 report by invited authors, review the options for the ESA CCI portal and toolkit and review of status of ESA CCI projects. There were presentations from related FP7 projects.

(Re)Thinking National Climate Scenarios

16 December 2013

Reading, Uk http://www.icad.leeds.ac.uk/events.html

This international workshop brought producers and users of climate scenarios/projections together and explored how different national climate scenarios were developed, what lessons can be learned about the social, political and technical issues that shaped them, and where the next generation of projections might lead us.

The Heathrow series of measurements received a lot of attention because of their proximity to an area of severe flooding along the Thames river West of London, but those familiar with climate statistics will notice that the duration of the series, at little over 50 years, is too short to give reliable information about trends in extremes. For comparison a similar figure based on the 150 years of data available from Oxford is shown in Figure 2, this time showing the wettest month of each year. The longer record dispels any illusion that there is a clear trend in such events in southern England. The wettest month in the 19th century has about 30% more precipitation than the wettest of the last 50 years [data source: UK Met Office].

The rainfall measurements from Oxford and Heathrow illustrate three difficulties associated with the study of extreme rainfall: the events are localised (the last winter was wetter than usual in Oxford, but not exceptionally so), sporadic, and many observational records do not extend far enough back in the past. It is clear that we need to be careful in interpreting extremes.

Figure 2: the wettest month of each year, recorded at Oxford.

IPCC, 2013: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 1535pp.

The data used here are obtained from the UK Met Office: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/climate-historic/#?tab=climateHistoric

Copernicus passed another significant milestone in on April 3rd this year with the launch of the first Sentinel mission in French Guiana. The Sentinel series of satellites, launched and operated by the European Space Agency on behalf of Copernicus, will provide a new generation of high quality environmental observations to feed the Copernicus services. Sentinel 1 is already providing information to support flood relief efforts in Namibia and the Balkans.

Sentinel Launch