Like this one:
![britainAR[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/britainar1.png?quality=75)
Image from NOAA ESRL
From the Institute of Physics
Atmospheric rivers set to increase UK winter flooding
The prolonged heat wave that has bathed the UK in sunshine over the past month has given the country an unexpected taste of summer that has seemed to be missing in recent years.
However, a new study published today, 24 July, in IOP Publishing’s Environmental Research Letters, has provided warnings that will chime with those accustomed to more typical British weather.
According to the study, winter flooding in the UK is set to get more severe and more frequent under the influence of climate change as a result of a change in the characteristics of atmospheric rivers (ARs).
ARs are narrow regions of intense moisture flows in the lower troposphere of the atmosphere that deliver sustained and heavy rainfall to mid-latitude regions such as the UK.
They are responsible for many of the largest winter floods in the mid-latitudes and can carry extremely large amounts of water: the AR responsible for flooding in the northwest of the UK in 2009 transported 4500 times more water than the average flow in the River Thames in London.
The researchers, from the University of Reading and University of Iowa, found that large parts of the projected changes in AR frequency and intensity would be down to thermodynamic changes in the atmosphere, rather than the natural variability of the climate, suggesting that it is a response to anthropogenic climate change.
To reach these conclusions, the researchers used simulations from five state-of-the-art climate models to investigate how the characteristics of ARs may change under future climate change scenarios.
Firstly, they used the climate models to see how accurately they could simulate the ARs that occurred between 1980 and 2005. The five models did this successfully and were deemed capable of projecting how future ARs will develop under different scenarios.
The models were then used to simulate future conditions under two scenarios – RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 – that represent different, yet equally plausible, scenarios for future increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. They projected changes that would occur between 2074 and 2099.
Each of the five models simulated an increase in AR frequency. For the RCP8.5 projections, which represents stronger increases in greenhouse gas concentrations than RCP4.5, there was a striking level of consistency in the magnitude of change in AR frequency – all models showed an approximate doubling of the number of future ARs compared to the simulations for 1980 – 2005.
The models also projected an increase in intensity of the ARs, meaning an AR impacting the UK in the future is projected to deliver more moisture, potentially causing larger precipitation totals.
Lead author of the research, Dr David Lavers, said: “ARs could become stronger in terms of their moisture transport. In a warming world, atmospheric water vapour content is expected to rise due to an increase in saturation water vapour pressure with air temperature. This is likely to result in increased water vapour transport.
“The link between ARs and flooding is already well established, so an increase in AR frequency is likely to lead an increased number of heavy winter rainfall events and floods. More intense ARs are likely to lead to higher rainfall totals, and thus larger flood events.”
From Wednesday 24 July, this paper can be downloaded from http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034010/article
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Ah.. so UK is in for a dry spell !
All this research is pointless. UK weather can be forecasted deterministically: it’s the opposite of whatever the Met Office predicts.
We stopped having hot summers for as long as they kept promising “BBQ weather” year after year. Then they met in mid-June 2013, told the world no more British heat for a decade, and lo and behold on perfect cue we got the hottest and driest July in ages.
The heatwave is now going to end, after some poor soul was quoted saying it was going to last a month. And it started raining in 2012 as soon as the Met Office became sure the drought was here to stay.
I say, this is a major achievement. Not even the astrologer is able to be wrong all of the time. All that public money spent in Met Office supercomputers, well spent indeed!!
“To reach these conclusions, the researchers used simulations from five state-of-the-art climate models ”
Better buy plenty of sun tan oil and get the swimming trunks out then.
@omnologos – well put – I couldn’t have done better.
All this tax money spent to determine what will happen in a warming climate! must have some ace computer models, a Sinclair Z80 or older!
The UK put a boat out to sea in 1912 and proclaimed it to be unsinkable.
Omnologos – But the cheeeldren we have to think about, we need a bigger much better super computer to tell’s yuz we woz right all along yesterday – I do see how it works now – Simples.
Of course to be called science it must testable and falsifiable, and we only need to wait until between 2074 and 2099 to test their model.
What, pray tell, “thermodynamic changes in the atmosphere” did they find between 1980-2005, correlated with ACC, of course, to use as the independent variable when projecting the dependent variable, AR? They were smart enough to predict changes starting 62 years from now; well beyond the professional life of any researchers involved.
We have moved on a long way from those ignorant souls of the Middle Ages who believed the Earth was flat and was held up by giant tortoises.
And holding up those tortoises were more tortoises.
In fact it was tortoises all the way down.
With our greatly advanced knowledge of today we know they were very wrong.
It’s not tortoises that the world now rests on.
It’s climate models, all the way down.
Cry me an atmospheric river.
Jim Steele – How the holy…. – They really are extracting the urine.
I suspect that gravity has a much larger role in climate than previously suspected.
Do the orbital parameters 1,12,28,37,48(9) mean anything? Does the series next = round(previous *1.3371) starting from one and Power have any of the above.
And why if I use the above simple piece of maths above can I guess precisely right this months UAH figure of 0.3c (go check if you do not believe me).
They base their analysis on presumed increase in water vapor but even Trenberth has shown that global water vapor is tied to the frequency of El Ninos and in Europe “The main region where
positive trends are not very evident is over Europe, in spite of large and positive trends over the North Atlantic since 1988.”
In accord with the El Nino connection Vonder Haar,T., et al., (2012) (Weather and Climate Analyses Using the New NVAP-Measures Global Water Vapor Dataset. Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L15802, doi:10.1029/2012GL052094.) show water vapor is declining since 1998.
Where, precisely, are the headwaters to these atmospheric rivers? Oh wait, I know, they’re in the grant offices. And, years ago those rivers started out as little trickles. And, as the self serving warnings ensued, those little trickles of money turned into rivers of money. Now, they’re virtual torrents of money. Interestingly, water usually puts out fire, but these are very special rivers indeed, because they burn through money.
Our money.
So they took an ensemble of models, tuned them to hindcast the available record, then fed them the output (“plausible” projections) of other models. And we should have confidence in this why?
I think the way to make this kind of research more sporting is impose the requirement that in order to publish publicly-funded climate research that “projects” some result, you must put up a bond for 50% of the funding amount, which is then forfeit if your projections fail. Who would be crazy enough to offer such a bond? Why the university sponsoring the research of course.
If putting your money and mouth together behind the same claim is too burdensom, then just put a disclaimer as part of the abstract, which must be included in the press release:
There. Now everybody knows where they stand.
The concept seems like such a sensible analysis of real weather patterns, then they started mumbling about the model deities punishing England for CO2…
Until all of the code, data and all runs are released for general consumption, I remain unconvinced. Omnologos has a far better proved method of weather planning in England.
Just as a new prince is born the long summer heat wave ends in violent storms – extreme weather, an omen…and the Met were the first to take notice? The old methods always worked better than their super computers.
I wish the Met Office would stop predicting barbeque summers and the like, and give up and go home so that competent meteorologists can do the job.
Just wonder what the possibility is that the missing atmospheric hotspot will never materialize. What if the extra water vapor in the atmosphere is simply carried along air currents (looks like the Gulf Stream to me in your picture above) to a place where it can fall out? What does that mean for snowfall and ice potential in the winter time if Arctic air meets up with the “extra” vapor? Of course. Increased albedo, or a natural coping mechanism likely not accounted for.
The Met Office has had its Tiljanders upside down for some time now.
The council inspector who checks to see if you have a hose pipe in use is finding it difficult to walk from house to house with his flippers on.
A remarkable number of recent WUWT headline posts involve climate and weather modeling and models to a greater or lesser extent.
Understandable considering our host’s background and business interests in weather forecasting.
What has become striking over the last few months at least is when reading all the commentor’s posts, there is an fast increasing level of cynicism being expressed through increasingly biting commentator’s sarcasm about climate models and climate modelers.
This cynicism seems to run right across the board covering not only a wide spectrum of science lay persons but also highly qualified professional people particularly from the engineering sciences and even from what i can glean from the comments, many non climate scientists who regularly comment on WUWT.
All of which spells deep long term troubles for the climate modeling community as it becomes increasingly obvious that their predictions are continuing to fail in nearly every single aspect.
It is becoming very apparent that the climate modelers in their hubris have badly over reached their ability to make any worthwhile predictions for the future global climate or any sectors of that climate.
Unfortunately this changing public attitude towards climate modeling has not yet penetrated the thick hides of the highly grant supported and closeted climate modeling community .
Climate modeling and modelers will invariably pay a severe price sometime in the near future for this overweening hubris.
The best advice the climate modelers could now follow would be;
When you find yourself in a very deep hole, stop digging.
.
And perhaps it is time for climate modelers to take on some humbleness and take on board that well known saying from Niels Bohr, the famous pre WW2 physicist who is quoted as saying ;
” Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.”
“The researchers, from the University of Reading and University of Iowa, found that large parts of the projected changes in AR frequency and intensity would be down to thermodynamic changes in the atmosphere, rather than the natural variability of the climate, suggesting that it is a response to anthropogenic climate change.”
*
I understood that the response to anthropogenic catastrophic warming climate change weather weirding disruption poisoning – was supposed to be hiding deep in the ocean. That’s why we can’t find it. That’s why there’s been no warming for about two decades. Isn’t that what the “climate scientists” have told us?
Either it’s in the ocean and not toying with us out here, in which case, there is no response to it in the atmosphere, or it’s not in the ocean, in which case – where’s the warming?
It’s another example of making the claim that anthropogenic catastrophic warming climate change weather weirding disruption poisoning – influences everything while still managing to hide away the dreaded heat that was supposed to trigger all these events in the first place!
This CO2 stuff is amazing!
forget summer in the UK – and head for Fiji instead. read for details:
23 July: Brookings Institution: Elizabeth Ferris: Bringing Together Disaster and Climate Change Networks: Historic Meeting in the Pacific
I recently participated in the Joint Meeting of the Pacific Platform for Disaster Risk Management and the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable July 8-11th in Nadi, Fiji which marked the first ever attempt to bring together different regional networks working on climate change and disasters. It was a rich and eye-opening experience to be present in this gathering of several hundred people representing governments, regional bodies galore, international organizations, academics, NGOs and civil society groups…
It is now generally accepted that one of the consequences of climate change will be an increase in the severity, intensity and unpredictability of weather-related disasters. And yet in most regions, there are separate networks of international and regional organizations working on climate change adaptation and on disaster risk management. On the surface it makes sense to bring these networks together: surely everyone can agree that one of the ways to adapt to the effects of climate change is to reduce the risk of disasters. How can risks from disasters be considered separately from risks posed by climate change? …
But just as the effects of climate change are being felt first in the Pacific, perhaps the Pacific is also leading the way in dealing with the administrative and political obstacles that prevent a more holistic approach to these issues. It’s too early to tell whether these attempts will be successful, but it was a privilege to watch a small part of the process.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/07/23-disaster-management-climate-change-pacific-meeting-ferris
I couldn’t even read all of this.
My Bullshat detector was going wild.
On it’s face this is so unbelievable it almost hurts. The authors appear to have supplanted the jet stream with an entirely invented phenomenon.
Place your bets that none of this will ever be shown to have any merit at all.
Label me a….skeptic.