The role for climate services in handling climate change risk: contributions of UKCP18

The new UKCP18 scenarios are designed to help inform the management of future risks from climate variability and change. UKCP18, produced by the Met Office, Defra and the Environment Agency, provides new probabilistic estimates of the ranges of future climate change that are projected for UK land areas for a number of different potential future emission scenarios. A new set of global climate model projections provide plausible storylines of future climate, running to the end of the 21st century. A subset of the global projections has been downscaled to the finer scale of 12km over the UK and Europe. Later, the 12km simulations will be supplemented with simulations from a new convective permitting model at 2.2km. Updated sea level projections have been produced for time-average changes and changes in water level extremes, including storm surges and waves.
There has been significant user engagement with UKCP18 from the start of its development; including tailoring the guidance that accompanies the projections so they better match user needs, and testing the knowledge and data delivery systems. Users have also produced demonstration studies of how they aim to use UKCP18 since its launch in November 2018.

This meeting will explore how the UKCP18 climate tools were produced, including their strengths and limitations. It will showcase examples of how users are starting to exploit UKCP18 results and consider their plans for use ahead of the next UK climate change risk assessment. It will also consider the need and opportunity for alternative approaches to generating decisions–relevant climate projections.