The hackathon’s aim is to provide an opportunity for teams of students to analyse and visualise aspects of the Met Office’s UKCP18 climate projections, and these are some research questions that teams might be interested in investigating during the hackathon.

The changing risk of severe wildfires

Clair Barnes (Statistical Science) and Theo Keeping (Geography)

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 aims to produce an interactive visualisation of these changing value of this index over the UK, to highlight those areas at greatest risk in the future.

Change in dangerously high temperatures over the UK

Clair Barnes (Statistical Science)

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 aims to compute 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 to combine 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.

  • Blazejczyk, K., Epstein, Y., Jendritzky, G., Staiger, H., & Tinz, B. (2012). Comparison of UTCI to selected thermal indices. International journal of biometeorology, 56(3), 515-535.

An exposure weighted warming

Chris Brierley (Geography)

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 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 will compute metrics of this indicator for the U.K. it will use temperatures scenarios from the UK climate projections combined with a range of population projections (shared socio-economic pathways). There is potential to look at the difference between urban and rural populations as well.

  • Costello, A., Abbas, M., Allen, A., Ball, S., Bell, S., Bellamy, R., Friel, S., Groce, N., Johnson, A., Kett, M. and Lee, M., 2009. Managing the health effects of climate change: lancet and University College London Institute for Global Health Commission. The Lancet, 373(9676), pp.1693-1733 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60935-1

Mapping climate change onto the political landscape

Chris Brierley (Geography)

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 will look at climate change impacts at the consistuency level and potentially explore its relationships with voting patterns.

Emulation of extreme winds

Clair Barnes and Francois-Xavier Briol (Statistical Science)

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?

Changes in dependence between extremes

Clair Barnes and Emma Simpson (Statistical Science)

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. This could involve investigating questions such as: ‘will extreme temperature events become more localised or more widespread?’

  • Coles, S., Heffernan, J. & Tawn, J. Dependence Measures for Extreme Value Analyses. Extremes 2, 339–365 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009963131610

Unselected Projects

The following 3 projects were not tackled by the hackathon, but may be of general interest

Future shipping forecast

The Met office’s daily shipping forecast has a dedicated following among both mariners and landlubbers alike. Writers on climate change sometimes have used an imagined future shipping forecast as a narrative device. The Met Office climate projections include daily data right out over the ocean. This project could stretch from mapping future storm statistics to writing marine forecasts for individual days.

  • Today’s shipping forecast https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/specialist-forecasts/coast-and-sea/shipping-forecast

Port Fortification

Climate change Will result in both sea level rise and changes to britain’s agriculture One metric used to look at the suitability of climate for various crops is growing degree days. Combined with other climate thresholds, this metric can be used to define the Winkler index of viticulture regions. Winkler V is especially suitable for grapes used in the production of fortified wine. This project will look at whether anywhere in the British Isles will is projected to have the right kind of climate to make port.

  • White, M.A., Diffenbaugh, N.S., Jones, G.V., Pal, J.S. and Giorgi, F., 2006. Extreme heat reduces and shifts United States premium wine production in the 21st century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(30), pp.11217-11222 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0603230103

Native gators?

50 million years ago (in the Eocene), the climate was much hotter than today and crocodiles lived in the Arctic. Their biology means they cannot survive if the temperature drops below freezing for long. Could they survive in the UK in future? This project will involve exploring occurence of temperature thresholds, and visualising when/if they are crossed in the projections. This project also explores the role of invasive species and ecological niches under a changing climate.

Initial project allocation

These projects are only our suggested starting groups. There will be an opportunity to switch early on during the event

Wildfires Heatwave Popn.wgtd Politics Emulation Co-extremes
Dan Anna-Leigh Yasna Safia Charles Anna
Emily Cheng Marcin Alessandra F-X Ben
Niamh Guokai Salma Jiarong Georgina Ferhat
Sam Xin   Meng Jade Fiona
Theo Ziwei   Sophia Oscar Ilya
Yasmin       Ahsana Jakob
Youngseok