New Weather Generator to fill critical gap in UKCP18 climate projections

DARe has co-created a next-generation weather generator to help understand future climate-related impacts on transport infrastructure.

Understanding our future climate is key to transforming and adapting our transport infrastructure to meet current and future challenges. By accounting for the changing climate, decision-makers can consider the conditions that transport assets and systems will need to operate and perform under, and the kinds of future weather events that may cause damage or reduced performance.

Climate models are essential for understanding our future climate, but the resolution of their projections is typically unsuitable for assessing impacts at a local level. This means their outputs must be translated to a finer spatial scale. This can be done using tools such as weather generators (WGs), which can produce future climate projections at the required level of detail and also correct for biases inherent in climate model simulations.

Close up of rain drops hitting the surface of water

The new DARe weather generator, created in collaboration with the Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water, produces downscaled projections of weather variables under future climate, using the UKCP18 projections.

The previous UKCP09 climate projections included a weather generator (WG), but UKCP18 does not. Researchers within DARe and the Climate + Co-Centre are filling this gap with a new WG to supplement the UKCP18 projections, enabling more detailed and locally relevant impact assessment and large-ensembles of weather time-series. The WG can provide weather time series at ~1km, 1 hr resolution over spatial domains for the observed and future climate up to 2080 under different emissions pathways. These projections provide multiple plausible scenarios of future climate that can then be used as modelling inputs for transport impact assessment and stress-testing infrastructure, supporting adaptation and resilience planning.

“Climate change adversely impacts our transportation system and the users that rely on it. Adaptation and building resilience to future changes in climate relies on having reliable projections of the future. The Weather Generator helps in this regard by providing multiple plausible future pathways in which the climate may evolve. Impact modelers can use these projections to assess risks from future extreme weather events thereby contributing to climate change adaptation and building a climate resilient transportation system.”

Dr Mohammed Azharuddin, Research Associate in weather generator, Newcastle University

The DARe Hub is developing a transferrable, usable Transport Performance and Risk Analysis Framework (TPRAF), to enable local, regional and national decision-makers to assess and balance the demands associated with climate resilience, adaptation, and decarbonisation, when addressing risks to transport infrastructure performance and operations.

The weather generator will play a key role in the development of the TPRAF as it is tested through selected case studies, particularly in the Integrated Modelling Platform (IMP). The IMP combines models and datasets to simulate climate-related disruptions to transport infrastructure and users and provides a dynamic understanding of how climate hazards (e.g. floods, heatwaves, windstorms, and their combinations), might disrupt transport systems, helping to measure impacts and inform adaptation strategies.

“The IMP relies on representations of future weather extremes under future climate in order to assess their impact on transport infrastructure and users. The Weather Generator allows us to produce future weather datasets that feed into the IMP, where we can then simulate their impact on the decarbonised transport system of the future and assess adaptation strategies to improve resilience.”

Dr Alistair Ford, DARe Co-Investigator and IMP lead, Newcastle University