Dangerous European storms at different levels of global warming (NERC GW4+ DTP Projects 2018-19)

The project will use general circulation models (GCMs) to simulate many future climates at 0.5C intervals of global averaged temperature above present climate. The project will make use of super-ensembles of initial conditions perturbations, allowing for large sample sizes of
the future projections, and so allowing for analysis of extremes. The GCM data will be compared with high-resolution observational data of mean sea level pressure. The feature tracking code of Massey, 2016 will be used to calculate storm intensity, depression and location, primarily in the North Atlantic basin, although other basins will be considered. The overarching aim is to determine what level of globally averaged warming is dangerous for storms hitting western Europe. The sub aims are: 1) to develop a metric as to how to define ‘dangerous’ storms, which is likely to relate to extreme precipitation or extreme winds. 2) To determine when storm track intensity and location are detectably different from pre-industrial greenhouse gas levels, and attribute that to an external forcing. 3) To understand the governing dynamics behind the change.