Towards a new package of UK Climate Information for national risk assessment and adaptation planning

UK National Climate Scenarios currently provided through the UKCP18 projection set provide a common basis for national risk assessment and adaptation planning. The UK is now looking towards a new generation of UK Climate Information (UKCI) products, and here we describe the current thinking around what might be included.

We have recently assessed whether there is a need to update this set of products to address user needs and exploit latest science opportunities. We have found that user needs have evolved significantly since the UKCP18 projections were designed, leaving significant gaps between needs and available information, specifically in the areas of present-day climate and recent climate events, representation of wider uncertainties (including both a range of plausible emissions scenarios, and more  ‘extreme’ or high impact, low likelihood’ scenarios and information to inform the marine climate impacts community. We have also identified areas of new science capability which offer new opportunities to address these user needs. These advances include improvements in the traditional approaches employed in the provision of future climate projections for adaptation planning (updated global model ensembles, various downscaling approaches including convective permitting regional projections, improvements in constraining model ensembles), developments in a wider range techniques are increasingly being used in the assessment of climate resilience. Recent studies of unseen extreme events in large ensembles of present-day climate, operational rapid event attribution, new simulations and understanding around earth system tipping points and new coupled regional downscaling capability.