Co-occurring British flood-wind events (1980-2080): Their anatomy & drivers

In wintertime, infrastructure and property in NW Europe are threatened by multiple meteorological hazards, and it is increasingly apparent that these exacerbate risk by tending to co-occurring in events that last days to weeks. Impacted by Atlantic storms, Great Britain (GB) is a sentinel location for weather that later tracks into NW Europe.   A recent, dramatic storm sequence (Dudley, Eunice, Franklin) demonstrated the need for a multi-hazard view by bringing a mixture of damaging and disruptive extremes including extreme winds and flooding over 7-10 days in Feb 2022.

This work uses a stakeholder inspired, event-based approach to jointly consider these two hazards.  A wind event set (n = 3,426) is created from the 12km regional UK Climate projections (1981-1999, 2061-2079) to match previously created high-flow events (Griffin et al, 2023). Then, the two hazards’ time-series are merged using windows up to a maximum size (Δt = 1-180 days) positioned to maximize the size of the largest events’ impact. The benefits and limitations of this methodology are discussed, anatomy of storm sequences (Δt = 21 days) discussed, and potential drivers of co-occurrence in the multi-hazard sequences (e.g. jet stream position/strength) examined.