UKCP18 Waves

The UKCP18 waves internship aims to improve understanding of the policy drivers in decisions-making for managing coastal flooding and erosion risk by close interaction with DEFRA. It will also facilitate the running of downscaled surge and wave models of the North West European shelf, in order to make projections of future surge and wave climate to inform coastal flood risk. NOC has previously played a role in the UK Climate Projections exercise (UKCP09) by providing wave projections for the Marine Projections report (Lowe et al., 2009), on an ad hoc basis. The next revision of these climate impact projections is now in preparation (UKCP18). There is already a close working relationship between NOC, the Met Office, and the Environment Agency, through work on wave and surge modelling, and operational capacity with the Met Office Flood Forecasting Centre (http://www.ffc-environment-agency.metoffice.gov.uk/ ), and the UK Natural Hazards Partnership (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/nhp/). These works are overseen and funded by Defra, who make sure the science is pulled-through into policy. This internship would allow a NOC scientist to become more familiar with the Defra policy needs, while addressing science questions around coastal flood risk.

The intern will collate the wave and surge projections from the latest numerical models (NEMO-surge-WW3) forced by the latest climate projections from global Earth System models (from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5, CMIP5, as used by IPPC Assessment Report 5), downscaled using high resolution atmospheric models from the EuroCORDEX project. The project will also deliver a new wave model run forced by the atmospheric RCA4 model. The internship will focus specifically on modelling surface waves, whilst parallel work on storm surge is ongoing at the Met Office. A close partnership between our groups has already been established through UKCP09, and more recent work on flood risk for Singapore (Bricheno et al. 2015).

As part of UKCP18, parallel downscaled surge modelling will be done at the Met Office, in close communication with NOC. We will collaborate to ensure the same climate model forcings are used so that a consistent set of surge and wave projections can be delivered to UKCP18. Extreme value methods will be used to project coastal impacts at key sites. We will consult with the Met Office stakeholder groups in order to decide where policy-relevant outputs should be delivered. There is also the possibility of implementing the statistical downscaling approach used by Tom Howard to add value to the global data. This method (developed for surge modelling) uses global mean sea level pressure to make prediction of surge extremes at key coastal sites based on the relationship between large scale driving meteorology and surge maxima based on existing UKCP09 datasets

The objective of the project is to build a relationship between NOC, Defra, and the Met Office, to tighten links between policy advisors and cutting edge climate science. While establishing this connection, we will deliver at least one science paper in a high impact journal. Another delivery of the project will be large wave model data sets covering the whole UK coast, which will be shared beyond the lifetime of this internship.

Bricheno, L., Cannaby, H., Howard, T., McInnes, K., & Palmer, M. (2015). Singapore's Second National Climate Change Study - Climate Projections to 2100 Science Report. Chapter 9: Extreme Sea Level Projections.