Added value of seasonal hindcasts to create UK hydrological drought storylines

Chan, Wilson C. H.; Arnell, Nigel W.; Darch, Geoff; Facer-Childs, Katie; Shepherd, Theodore G.; Tanguy, Maliko

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-1065-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-1065-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Drought, society, and ecosystems (NHESS/BG/GC/HESS inter-journal...

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-1065-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

Research article

|

28 Mar 2024

Research article |

| 28 Mar 2024

Added value of seasonal hindcasts to create UK hydrological drought storylines

Wilson C. H. Chan, Nigel W. Arnell, Geoff Darch, Katie Facer-Childs, Theodore G. Shepherd, and Maliko Tanguy

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-1065-2024-supplement

Data sets

Storylines of the 2022 UK drought using seasonal hindcasts at Anglian catchments and boreholes W. Chan et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7756582

Gridded estimates of daily and monthly areal rainfall for the United Kingdom (1890-2019) [CEH-GEAR] M. Tanguy et al. https://doi.org/10.5285/dbf13dd5-90cd-457a-a986-f2f9dd97e93c

HadUK-Grid - A new UK dataset of gridded climate observations (http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/4dc8450d889a491ebb20e724debe2dfb) D Hollis et al. https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.78

Seasonal forecast daily and subdaily data on single levels Copernicus Climate Change Service, Climate Data Store https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.181d637e

The ERA5 global reanalysis (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels) H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803

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Short summary

The most recent drought in the UK was declared in summer 2022. We pooled a large sample of plausible winters from seasonal hindcasts and grouped them into four clusters based on their atmospheric circulation configurations. Drought storylines representative of what the drought could have looked like if winter 2022/23 resembled each winter circulation storyline were created to explore counterfactuals of how bad the 2022 drought could have been over winter 2022/23 and beyond.