Climate Change Impacts on the Extreme Rainfall for Selected Sites in North Western England

Mawada Abdellatif, William Atherton, Rafid Alkhaddar

School of the Built Environment, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK.

DOI: 10.4236/ojmh.2012.23007                

Abstract

Impact and adaptation assessments of climate change often require more detailed information of future extreme rainfall events at higher resolution in space and/or time, which is usually, projected using the Global Climate Model (GCM) for different emissions of greenhouse concentration. In this paper, future rainfall in the North West region of England has been generated from the outputs of the HadCM3 Global Climate Model through downscaling , employing a hybrid Generalised Linear Model (GLM) together with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Using two emission scenarios (A1FI and B1), the hybrid downscaling model was proven to have the capability to successfully simulate future rainfall. A combined peaks-over-threshold (POT)-Generalised Pareto Distribution approach was then used to model the extreme rainfall and then assess changes to seasonal trends over the region at a daily scale until the end of the 21st century. In general, extreme rainfall is predicted to be more frequent in winter seasons for both high (A1FI) and low (B1) scenarios, however for summer seasons, the region is predicted to experience some increase in extreme rainfall under the high scenario and a drop under the low scenario. The variation in intensity of extreme rainfall was found to be based on location,season, future period, return period as well as the emission scenario used.

Keywords

Artificial Neural Network; Climate Change; Downscaling; Extremes Frequency Analysis Generalised Linear Model; Generalised Pareto Distribution

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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