Climate change is, as expected, leading to an increase in extreme weather, including in the UK.
The latest State of the UK Climate report, published in July 2023 and providing a look back at 2022, highlighted a year of extremes. 2022 was shown to be the warmest year in the UK series from 1884, 0.9 °C above the 1991–2020 average, and included the first time 40 °C was recorded in the UK. Earlier this month, we also announced that 2023 was provisionally the second warmest year on record for the UK. Records also show that the UK is getting wetter, and heavy rainfall exceeding 50mm has become more frequent in the autumn. A warmer, moister atmosphere increases the capacity for deluges of rain, which can result in serious flooding.
In recognition of this increase in extremes and a need to continue to improve predictions of extreme weather and to assess its impacts, last year we formed a team of experts from across the Met Office to focus on the links between climate change and weather extremes. Ultimately this team seeks to help the public, industry, business, and local and national government deal with extreme weather and remain safe and resilient in a changing climate.
Trans-disciplinary expertise
As the UK’s national weather service, forecasting the weather is the Met Office’s core business, but combining this with world-leading climate science from the Met Office Hadley Centre means that we can provide seamless scientific expertise across weather and climate timescales.
The new team is co-ordinating and developing a trans-disciplinary approach across the Met Office and our partners, with the team itself bringing together different areas of expertise. Headed up by Climate Extremes Principal Fellow and Chief Meteorologist Paul Davies, the team also includes experts in climate monitoring, weather and climate extremes and the Met Office’s first Socio-Meteorologist.
Providing context for extreme weather
A key role of the new team is to help provide the context around extreme weather. Increasingly, the public, media, industry and government are asking questions about whether particular weather trends or extreme weather events are due to climate change or part of the natural variability of UK weather. One of the key initial tasks of the team last year was to collate the latest science on different weather extremes for the UK, helping provide colleagues with the right information they needed to answer some of these questions. We’ll be exploring some of the top-level findings of this work in another blog post later this month.
In the midst of a severe weather event, we often get asked whether this has been caused by climate change. Our team of experts has been building on the high levels of expertise in attribution science from within the Met Office, to help provide quicker answers to these questions without moving away from the scientific rigour of attribution studies. You can learn more about attributing extreme weather to climate change on our website.
Understanding impacts
As well as bringing together the science of weather and climate, understanding the impacts of extreme weather and climate change is critical to improving resilience. Through a process of reviewing extreme events and considering the likelihood of unprecedented extremes, Paul Davies’ team is helping to bring together information that will assist all parts of society in preparing for and adapting to extreme weather. We know that extreme weather due to our changing climate is already happening and will continue to happen in the years to come, so building resilience is critical.
Reducing the impact of climate change
Building resilience is one part of the puzzle in how we can tackle climate change, but adaptation needs to go hand in hand with mitigation. Deep and rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions will help reduce the likelihood of the most severe impacts of climate change.
Action is required across all levels of society – to find out more about how you can make a difference, take a look at our Get Climate Ready webpages.
Follow the #GetClimateReady hashtag on X (formerly Twitter) to learn more about weather and climate extremes this month.