How will the persistence and intensity of preciptiation events change in the future?

"Climate models project a general intensification of extreme precipitation during the 21st century, consistent with observed trends (Westra et al. 2013; Fischer & Knutti 2016) but large uncertainties in regional patterns of change (Donat et al. 2016) hamper the development of efficient adaptation strategies for flooding. Flooding presents a formidable challenge to public safety, life and the economy (Pielke and Downton 2000) and was identified as the top priority and risk for the UK in the 2017 Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA 2017). Flash floods from short-duration (sub-daily) rainfall extremes are particularly hazardous and responsible for fatalities (Archer and Fowler 2016), as they occur with little warning. Predicting how climate change will alter precipitation patterns is thus crucial for society and we may be able to better understand the drivers of predicted changes if we use an event-based analysis, examining intermittency in rainfall occurrence and linking this through to the intensity of these rainfall events over land. These are thought to be linked to distinct drivers - changes to large scale atmospheric circulation and changes in thermodynamics (temperature and humidity that often occurs at a local scale).
This project provides the opportunity to examine some of these issues using new global high resolution observational gauge and satellite precipitation datasets and outputs from very-high resolution convection permitting climate models to explore how the identified drivers might change in the future. The skills that would be developed depend on the approach to be taken but could include: statistical analysis of large datasets; spatial modelling (e.g. GIS); climate model analysis
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