Abstract/Summary

Climate projections for the UK exhibit substantial uncertainty, and this uncertainty is a hindrance to robust and timely decision making on both adaptation and mitigation policy issues. A large part of the uncertainty is associated with dynamical changes of the regional atmospheric circulation rather than thermodynamic changes which are better constrained by model simulations. Of particular importance for the UK is the extent to which the North Atlantic jet will change over coming decades and the impact this will have on weather and climate in the region. In this paper we propose the use of jet-based storylines for assessing and communicating uncertainty in climate projections for the UK, wherein changes in each impact are explicitly conditioned on changes in the North Atlantic jet. This approach provides a framework for evaluating the impacts associated with a range of plausible future climate outcomes for the UK, including outcomes that may not be well represented in the current generation of climate models, and for communicating these potential outcomes. We construct a simple yet useful set of future jet storylines for both summer and winter and for 2C and 4C global warming levels and illustrate the utility of the approach by evaluating the impact of each jet storyline on future changes in UK precipitation. In doing so, we demonstrate that the relationships between the jet and UK precipitation are consistent between observed interannual variability and projected changes. This finding increases our confidence in projecting changes in UK precipitation associated with each storyline.