Impacting on our Lives: Using British sports and culture to explain uncertainty in climate projections

Whether its memories of a cold, frosty Christmas or an August bank holiday beach trip interrupted by rain, many cultural, sporting, and social events in the United Kingdom have strong associations with particular weather conditions. As the average global temperature increases, the impacts of a changing climate are likely to be felt across many aspects of British life, including in the public’s experiences of these popular events. Several recent works conducted by the UK Met Office have sought to make the local day-to-day impacts of climate change more understandable for the public by exploring likely climatic conditions of popular events by the 2050s. These works have received strong engagement from the public, demonstrating the demand for relevant and understandable climate information.

We serve this demand by using the 2018 UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) and HadUK-Grid observations data to evaluate how climate change will affect the climatology of a diverse range of British social, cultural, and sporting events. To explore and communicate the uncertainties in UKCP18 due to inherent model biases, several bias correction methods are applied to the data and the resulting data is analysed together to give an improved uncertainty range. The research will focus on assessing changes to temperature variables at global warming levels of 1.5°C and 3.0°C to illustrate these two future scenarios and the uncertainty within each scenario.

We will show that some events are likely to have a significantly altered climatology which is likely to substantially change the nature of these events or force them to change when they occur during the year to give the best chance of having favourable climatic conditions. By assessing the impact of climate change on popular British events such as the London Marathon and Glastonbury Festival the findings of this research will prove useful in communicating the impacts of climate change in a way which will resonate with the British public.