Outputs from the hackathon projects
The hackathon’s aim was to provide an opportunity for teams of students to analyse and visualise aspects of the Met Office’s UKCP18 climate projections. These are the outputs from the projects carried out
The changing risk of severe wildfires
Project brief: The Met Office Fire Severity Index (MOFSI) quantifies the likely severity of any wildfires that might occur, given the antecedent weather conditions; under the Met Office UKCP18 climate simulations, fire danger is projected to increase over the next 60 years. This project produced an interactive visualisation of these changing values of this index over the UK, to highlight those areas at greatest risk in the future.
View the interactive visualisations here
Changes in dangerously high temperatures over the UK
Project brief: Heat stress indices combine measures of air temperature and humidity to determine an apparent temperature - that is, how hot it actually feels. Surface air temperatures are projected to rise during the next century, but the impact on human health may be exacerbated by changes in humidity. This project computed indices of heat stress over the UK for the next 60 years based on the air temperatures and relative humidity simulated by the UKCP18 project, and combined these indices with estimates of the changing UK population to visualise the number of people expected to experience dangerously high temperatures in the coming decades.
View the report here
An exposure weighted warming
Project brief: The Lancet commission on health and climate change, hosted by UCL, report annually on a host of relevant indicators. An indicator that has been used is the exposure-weighted temperature increase, which is the global mean of a gridded temperature dataset averaged not by the area of each grid box but instead by the population that lives in it. This project computed metrics of this indicator for the UK, using temperatures scenarios from the UK climate projections combined with a range of population projections (shared socio-economic pathways).
View the results here
Mapping climate change onto the political landscape
Project brief: Climate change is a hot political topic at present, with the UK hosting COP26 and the Green Party taking an increased share of the vote in May’s local elections. How can the UK Climate Projections be made to align more closely with this political landscape? This project looked at climate change impacts at the consistuency level and explored its relationships with voting patterns.
Download the results here
Emulation of extreme winds
Project brief: High winds cause more insured losses throughout northern Europe than any other hazard, so understanding the changing risk from high wind speeds under climate change is critical. However, many climate models do not include variables like maximum gust speeds in their output. Is it possible to build a statistical model to accurately emulate maximum daily gust speeds using other variables?
View the results here
Changes in dependence between extremes
Project brief: When thinking about extreme weather conditions, it’s important to know whether or not variables can take their largest values simultaneously, as this information enables us to select appropriate statistical models. Changes in extremal dependence may also have important consequences for future risk and impact planning; a problem of particular interest is to understand how extremal dependence between weather variables at different locations may change in the future.