Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000

Nature volume 470, pages 382–385 (2011)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Interest in attributing the risk of damaging weather-related events to anthropogenic climate change is increasing1. Yet climate models used to study the attribution problem typically do not resolve the weather systems associated with damaging events2 such as the UK floods of October and November 2000. Occurring during the wettest autumn in England and Wales since records began in 17663,4, these floods damaged nearly 10,000 properties across that region, disrupted services severely, and caused insured losses estimated at £1.3 billion (refs 5, 6). Although the flooding was deemed a ‘wake-up call’ to the impacts of climate change at the time7, such claims are typically supported only by general thermodynamic arguments that suggest increased extreme precipitation under global warming, but fail8,9 to account fully for the complex hydrometeorology4,10 associated with flooding. Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing11,12, we generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred. Results are fed into a precipitation-runoff model that is used to simulate severe daily river runoff events in England and Wales (proxy indicators of flood events). The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Synoptic structure of Northern Hemisphere autumns.
Figure 2: Power spectra of daily river runoff for England and Wales autumns.
Figure 3: Change in occurrence frequency of daily river runoff for England and Wales autumn 2000.
Figure 4: Attributable risk of severe daily river runoff for England and Wales autumn 2000.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Hegerl, G. C. et al. in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (eds Solomon, S. et al.) Ch. 9, 663–746 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007)

  2. Stott, P. A. et al. Detection and attribution of climate change: a regional perspective. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Change 1, 192–211 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Alexander, L. V. & Jones, P. D. Updated precipitation series for the U.K. and discussion of recent extremes. Atmos. Sci. Lett. 1, 142–150 (2000)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  4. Marsh, T. J. & Dale, M. The UK floods of 2000–2001: a hydrometeorological appraisal. J. Chart. Inst. Wat. Environ. Mgmt 16, 180–188 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Association of British Insurers. Flooding: a partnership approach to protecting people. 〈http://www.abi.org.uk/Publications/Flooding_A_partnership_Approach_to_Protecting_People1.aspx〉 (2001)

  6. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. To What Degree Can the October/November 2000 Flood Events Be Attributed to Climate Change? (Final Report FD2304, DEFRA, London, 2001)

  7. Environment Agency. Lessons Learned: Autumn 2000 Floods (Environment Agency, Bristol, 2001)

  8. Lenderink, G. & Van Meijgaard, E. Increase in hourly precipitation extremes beyond expectations from temperature changes. Nature Geosci. 1, 511–514 (2008)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. O’Gorman, P. A. & Schneider, T. The physical basis for increases in precipitation extremes in simulations of 21st-century climate change. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 14773–14777 (2009)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  10. Blackburn, M. & Hoskins, B. J. Atmospheric variability and extreme autumn rainfall in the UK. 〈http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~mike/autumn2000.html〉 (2001)

  11. Allen, M. R. Do-it-yourself climate prediction. Nature 401, 642 (1999)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  12. Massey, N. et al. Data access and analysis with distributed federated data servers in climateprediction.net. Adv. Geosci. 8, 49–56 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Allen, M. R. Liability for climate change. Nature 421, 891–892 (2003)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Pitt, M. The Pitt Review: Lessons Learned from the 2007 Floods (Cabinet Office, London, 2008)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Wilby, R. L., Beven, K. J. & Reynard, N. S. Climate change and fluvial flood risk in the UK: more of the same? Hydrol. Process. 22, 2511–2523 (2008)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  16. Stone, D. A. & Allen, M. R. The end-to-end attribution problem: from emissions to impacts. Clim. Change 71, 303–318 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Robson, A. J. Evidence for trends in UK flooding. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 360, 1327–1343 (2002)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  18. Hannaford, J. & Marsh, T. High-flow and flood trends in a network of undisturbed catchments in the UK. Int. J. Climatol. 28, 1325–1338 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Maraun, D., Osborn, T. J. & Gillett, N. P. United Kingdom daily precipitation intensity: improved early data, error estimates and an update from 2000 to 2006. Int. J. Climatol. 28, 833–842 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Fowler, H. J. & Kilsby, C. G. A regional frequency analysis of United Kingdom extreme rainfall from 1961 to 2000. Int. J. Climatol. 23, 1313–1334 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Stott, P. A. et al. Observational constraints on past attributable warming and predictions of future global warming. J. Clim. 19, 3055–3069 (2006)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  22. Nozawa, T., Nagashima, T., Shiogama, H. & Crooks, S. A. Detecting natural influence on surface air temperature change in the early twentieth century. Geophys. Res. Lett. 32, L20719 (2005)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  23. Stott, P. A., Stone, D. A. & Allen, M. R. Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature 432, 610–614 (2004)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  24. Pope, V. D. & Stratton, R. A. The processes governing horizontal resolution sensitivity in a climate model. Clim. Dyn. 19, 211–236 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Massacand, A. C. Forecasting of Extreme Seasonal Precipitation: Insight into the ECMWF Potential (Technical Memorandum No. 415, ECMWF, 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Reynolds, R. W., Rayner, N. A., Smith, T. M., Stokes, D. C. & Wang, W. Q. An improved in situ and satellite SST analysis for climate. J. Clim. 15, 1609–1625 (2002)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  27. Uppala, S. M. et al. The ERA-40 re-analysis. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 131, 2961–3012 (2005)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  28. Lohmann, D., Nolte-Holube, R. & Raschke, E. A large-scale horizontal routing model to be coupled to land surface parametrization schemes. Tellus A 48, 708–721 (1996)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  29. Sexton, D. M. H., Rowell, D. P., Folland, C. K. & Karoly, D. J. Detection of anthropogenic climate change using an atmospheric GCM. Clim. Dyn. 17, 669–685 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Report of the Conference of the Parties Serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol on its Second Session, held at Nairobi from 6 to17 November 2006 (FCCC/KP/CMP/2006/10, United Nations Office at Geneva, Geneva, 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Keeling, C. D. & Whorf, T. P. in Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2005)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Prinn, R. G. et al. A history of chemically and radiatively important gases in air deduced from ALE/GAGE/AGAGE. J. Geophys. Res. 105, 17751–17792 (2000)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  33. Johns, T. C. et al. Anthropogenic climate change for 1860 to 2100 simulated with the HadCM3 model under updated emissions scenarios. Clim. Dyn. 20, 583–612 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Meehl, G. A. et al. Combinations of natural and anthropogenic forcings in twentieth-century climate. J. Clim. 17, 3721–3727 (2004)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  35. Beven, K. J. & Kirkby, M. J. A physically based, variable contributing area model of basin hydrology. Hydrol. Sci. J. 24, 43–69 (1979)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Natural Environmental Research Council — Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. The National River Flow Archive. 〈http://www.ceh.ac.uk/data/nrfa/〉 (2010)

  37. Fowler, H. J. & Kilsby, C. G. Implications of changes in seasonal and annual extreme rainfall. Geophys. Res. Lett. 30, 1720 (2003)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank all members of the public who ran HadAM3-N144 climate model simulations using the BOINC open source computing platform, and the climateprediction.net team for their technical support; M. Collins, N. Rayner, A. Jones and C. Johnson for originally supplying the HadAM3-N144 model, observed SSTs and sea ice, sulphate fields, and ozone fields, respectively; G. Meehl and T. Knutson for permission to use NCARPCM1 and GFDLR30 temperature data, respectively; S. Hay and I. Tracey for assistance with beta tests; C. Lee for technical advice; and W. Ingram and D. Rowlands for scientific advice. P.P. was supported by a NERC CASE studentship with Risk Management Solutions Ltd, by WWF International, and by NCCR climate. D.A.S. and P.P. received partial support from the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. P.A.S. was supported by the Joint DECC and Defra Integrated Climate Programme — DECC/Defra (GA01101). T.N. was supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. D.A.S. and M.R.A. received additional support from the Climate Change Detection and Attribution Project jointly funded by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Global Programs and the US Department of Energy. This research was also supported by the European Union (FP6) funded Integrated Project WATCH (contract number 036946) and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Pardeep Pall

    Present address: Present address: Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland.,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK,

    Pardeep Pall, Dáithí A. Stone & Myles R. Allen

  2. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland ,

    Pardeep Pall

  3. Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QG, UK ,

    Tolu Aina

  4. Tyndall Centre Oxford, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK ,

    Dáithí A. Stone & Myles R. Allen

  5. Met Office Hadley Centre, Fitzroy Road, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK ,

    Peter A. Stott

  6. National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan ,

    Toru Nozawa

  7. Risk Management Solutions Ltd, London EC3R 8NB, UK ,

    Arno G. J. Hilberts & Dag Lohmann

Authors
  1. Pardeep Pall
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Tolu Aina
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dáithí A. Stone
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Peter A. Stott
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Toru Nozawa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Arno G. J. Hilberts
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Dag Lohmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Myles R. Allen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

M.R.A., D.A.S, P.P. and P.A.S. designed the probabilistic event attribution framework. P.P. and T.A. implemented the framework, generating HadAM3-N144 climate model simulations using climateprediction.net distributed computing architecture, and feeding them into the precipitation-runoff model for England and Wales catchments designed and developed by D.L. and A.G.J.H. P.A.S. and T.N. contributed estimates of attributable warming using coupled climate models. P.P., D.A.S., M.R.A., A.G.J.H. and P.A.S. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pardeep Pall.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

The file contains Supplementary Methods, additional references, Supplementary Figures 1-6 with legends and Supplementary Tables 1-2. (PDF 1021 kb)

PowerPoint slides

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Pall, P., Aina, T., Stone, D. et al. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000. Nature 470, 382–385 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09762

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09762

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing Anthropocene

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: Anthropocene newsletter — what matters in anthropocene research, free to your inbox weekly.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing: Anthropocene
pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy