scholarly journals Using high-resolution climate change information in water management: a decision-makers' perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 379 (2195) ◽  
pp. 20200219
Author(s):  
H. G. Orr ◽  
M. Ekström ◽  
M. B. Charlton ◽  
K. L. Peat ◽  
H. J. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Management ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Flash Flood ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Government Support ◽  
Design Storm ◽  
Future Design ◽  
The Uk

The UK Climate Change Act requires the Environment Agency to report the risks it faces from climate change and actions taken to address these. Derived information from projections is critical to understanding likely impacts in water management. In 2019, the UK published an ensemble of high-resolution model simulations. The UKCP Local (2.2 km) projections can resolve smaller scale physical processes that determine rainfall and other variables at subdaily time-scales with the potential to provide new insights into extreme events, storm runoff and drainage management. However, simulations also need to inform adaptation. The challenge ahead is to identify and provide derived products without the need for further analysis by decision-makers. These include a wider evaluation of uncertainty, narratives about rainfall change across the projections and bias-corrected datasets. Future flood maps, peak rainfall estimates, uplift factors and future design storm profiles also need detailed guidance to support their use. Central government support is justified in the provision of up-to-date impacts information to inform flood risk management, given the large risks and exposure of all sectors. The further development of projections would benefit from greater focus and earlier scoping with industry representatives, operational tool developers and end users. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes and implications for flash flood risks’.

Exploring Funding in Higher Education Sector in Oman

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-20
Author(s):  
Mouza Said Al Kalbani ◽  
Ahmad Bintouq
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Private Education ◽  
Education Sector ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Government Support ◽  
Tuition Fees ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
The Us ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Uk

Funding of higher education institutions is a major growing expense for the Oman government (13–14% of the total spending in 2016) and is at par with that of other governments (e.g., 11% in the UK and 15.5% in the US). However, there has been little investigation into the funding of quality higher education in Oman. The present research project aims to explore the sources of funding at Oman universities after it opened the private education sector in 1996. The research methodology includes conducting interviews with leaders in higher education to explore different types of funding (e.g., gifts, tuition fees, government support). This will enhance our understanding, as well as that of decision-makers, regarding universities' funding sources and of the higher education landscape.

scholarly journals Climate change and water in the UK – past changes and future prospects

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Watts ◽  
Richard W. Battarbee ◽  
John P. Bloomfield ◽  
Jill Crossman ◽  
Andre Daccache ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Quality ◽  
Algal Blooms ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Climate Forcing ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Lake Water Quality ◽  
Winter Rainfall ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

Climate change is expected to modify rainfall, temperature and catchment hydrological responses across the world, and adapting to these water-related changes is a pressing challenge. This paper reviews the impact of anthropogenic climate change on water in the UK and looks at projections of future change. The natural variability of the UK climate makes change hard to detect; only historical increases in air temperature can be attributed to anthropogenic climate forcing, but over the last 50 years more winter rainfall has been falling in intense events. Future changes in rainfall and evapotranspiration could lead to changed flow regimes and impacts on water quality, aquatic ecosystems and water availability. Summer flows may decrease on average, but floods may become larger and more frequent. River and lake water quality may decline as a result of higher water temperatures, lower river flows and increased algal blooms in summer, and because of higher flows in the winter. In communicating this important work, researchers should pay particular attention to explaining confidence and uncertainty clearly. Much of the relevant research is either global or highly localized: decision-makers would benefit from more studies that address water and climate change at a spatial and temporal scale appropriate for the decisions they make.

Increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall events over the UK in the light of climate change.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Cotterill ◽  
Peter Stott ◽  
Elizabeth Kendon
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Heavy Rainfall ◽  
Daily Rainfall ◽  
Heavy Rainfall Event ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Intense Rainfall ◽  
Rainfall Events ◽  
Climate Forcings ◽  
The Uk

<p>We investigate the attribution of the flooding in Northern England that saw at least 500 homes flooded and over 1000 properties evacuated in flooded areas in 2019. This occurred during the wettest Autumn on record in some areas and also contained some very high daily rainfall totals. In the light of climate change, it is expected that intense rainfall events are to become more intense as a result of increased global average temperatures and the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, but here we investigate quantitatively how much climate change has increased the risk of such an event to date.</p><p>We use results from the 2.2km convective permitting high resolution local UK Climate Projections (UKCP) and observations to show that more intense rainfall events may already be occurring in Autumn in the UK. This work shows using this high resolution UKCP data that a heavy rainfall event exceeding 50mm in one day in Autumn was 33-40% more likely to occur in 2019 than 1985. Further work that looks at the HadGEM3-A simulations shows that these heavy rainfall days are more likely to occur in a climate impacted by human activity than one with just natural climate forcings.</p>

Reparametrizing rainfall generators with convective-permitting models to generate high-resolution rainfall for climate impact studies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuting Chen ◽  
Athanasios Paschalis ◽  
Nadav Peleg ◽  
Christian Onof
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Recent Decade ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Stochastic Weather Generator ◽  
Global Circulation Models ◽  
The Uk

<p>A high-resolution rainfall data at a km and sub-hourly scales provides a powerful tool for hydrological risk assessment in the current and the future climate. Global circulation models or regional circulation models generally provide projections at much coarser space-time resolutions of 10-100 kilometres and daily to monthly. In the recent decade, convection-permitting models (CPM) have been developed and enable the projection at a kilometre and sub-hourly scales. CPMs, due to their very high computational demand, are still limited to a small number of ensemble simulations. This limits their skill in hydrology, where quantification of extremes and their variability is essential for risk assessment and design. In this project, we propose the combined use of CPMs with stochastic rainfall generators to simulate ensemble of climate change at hydrologically relevant scales.</p><p>To achieve this, we used the STREAP space-time stochastic rainfall generator, a 1 km resolution composite rain radar data and a 2.2km CPM dataset from the UK Met Office. For the mid-land region of the UK, we parameterised STREAP for the present climate using rainfall observations. CPM simulations were used to derive the change of STREAP parameters with a changing climate. These parameters describe the change in weather patterns, the rainfall intensification, and changes in the structure of rainfall. Our results show that by combining a physics-based model and a stochastic weather generator we can simulate robust ensemble of rainfall at a minimal computational cost while preserving all physical attributes from climate change projections.</p>

scholarly journals Financial resilience of English local government in the aftermath of COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 813-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Ahrens ◽  
Laurence Ferry
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
News Media ◽  
Financial Management ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Government Support ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Financial Framework ◽  
The Uk

PurposeThe financial resilience of local authorities has been a serious concern over the past decade due to austerity and its effects on local government budgets despite rising service demands. More recently, the scale and suddenness of the shock from COVID-19 has exacerbated problems of financial resilience. This paper explores the financial management responses required by a sudden, nationwide pandemic of such severity.Design/methodology/approachThis paper applies the concept of financial resilience to English local government to analyse their situation in the aftermath of COVID-19. It is based on a close reading of official reports and the news media.FindingsLocal authority’s financial resilience could deal with normal levels of risk arising from austerity. However, the seriousness of COVID-19 alongside pressures still emanating from Brexit requires a significant level of central government support. This is critical as local government is expected to underpin future economic growth of the UK as well as deliver an important social response. Presently, the financial framework for funding individual local authorities through central government in terms of COVID-19 support is not on a reliable footing to answer specific demands. This can lead to gaming and perverse incentives.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to connect the financial resilience in the local government framework with the required central government funding procedures for sudden nationwide crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies the need to define what effect key variables, such as local government financial reserves, local deprivation indices and anticipatory financial management practices in local government should have on the determination of central government aid for individual local authorities.

scholarly journals Degree-Day Climatology over Central and Southeast Europe for the Period 1961-2018 – Evaluation in High Resolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 166-174
Author(s):  
Hristo Chervenkov ◽  
Vladimir Ivanov ◽  
Georgi Gadzhev ◽  
Kostadin Ganev ◽  
Dimitrios Melas
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Statistical Significance ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Degree Days ◽  
Heating And Cooling ◽  
Energy Needs ◽  
Cooling Degree Days ◽  
The Uk

AbstractThe ongoing climate change over Central and Southeast Europe has a great potential to affect significantly the public energy demands and in particular the energy consumption in the residential heating and cooling sector. The linkage of the ambient daily extreme and mean temperatures and the energy needs for condition or heat buildings can be quantified as numerical indicators as the heating and cooling degree-days. In the present study, these indicators are calculated according the UK Met Office methodology from the daily mean and extreme temperatures, which, in turn, are computed from the output of the MESCAN-SURFEX system in the frame the FP7 UERRA project. The study, which is performed in a very high resolution, is dedicated on the analysis of the spatial patterns as well as assessment of the magnitude and statistical significance of the temporal evolution of the heating and cooling degree-days. It reveals general tendencies which are coherent with the regional climate warming, but with high spatial heterogeneities. The study confirms the essential impact of the ongoing climate change on the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning industry over Central and Southeast Europe.

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