Using UNSEEN approach to attribute regional UK winter rainfall extremes

Abstract

Three out of the five highest daily winter rainfall totals on record over Northern England have occurred from 2015 onwards. Heavy rainfall events in the winters of 2013–2014, 2015–2016 and 2019–2020 led to more than 2.8-billion-pounds of insurance losses from flooding in the UK. Has the frequency of these events been influenced by human-induced climate change? Winter rainfall in the UK is extremely variable year-to-year, which makes the attribution of rainfall extremes particularly challenging. To tackle this problem, we introduce an UNprecedented Simulated Extreme Ensemble (UNSEEN) approach for the attribution of such extremes, thereby increasing the data available, and apply this approach to five recent flooding events on a regional scale. Using this method, for all five events we found a significant climate signal in the extreme regional rainfall totals immediately preceding the flooding. Results were fairly similar for each—with the events being found to become from 1.4 to 2.6 times more likely. An alternative attribution method that uses a different model with substantially less data did not find significant increases, reinforcing the need for very large amounts of data to detect significant changes in extreme rainfall against a noisy background of natural variability. We also examine how extreme rainfall is changing more broadly across English regions in winter, finding that 1-in-10 to 1-in-90-year winter rainfall totals have changed significantly in Northern England. The high volume of data using UNSEEN has enabled us to examine the dynamics of these events, showing that daily extremes in winter are likely to have increased across all the circulation patterns responsible for high rainfall in English regions.