Last week, New Scientist, Issue 2714 [27 June 2009] ran a short news item highlighting a new set of climate projections from the UK Met Office for the 2080s (oddly defined as the years 2070-2099). These are presented as a series of maps showing changes in summer mean temperature and summer and winter mean precipitation across the UK based on a 5km grid. The Met Office website also introduces the material and provides a link to the dedicated UK Climate Projections 09 website where the maps can be found. The New Scientist piece points out that some climate scientists feel that the projections are useless, and or misleading, because such fine resolution projections are bound to be upset by processes occuring at the local scale. There is also doubt that the climate models used to make the projections can handle areas of blocking high pressure well enough to make them useful.
So, the projections may or may not be useful or useless depending on who you believe! Nevertheless, I thought I would take a look at the maps and see what they tell me about the likely conditions in Plymouth in the 2080s (I have only just done the mental arithmetic, but I’ll (probably not) be 115 years old in 2080 which has depressed me a little). Anyway, for what it is worth, it looks like it’s going to be 3-4 degrees Celsius warmer and about 40% less wet in the summer and about 10% wettter in the winter…
Tim O'Hare 