Climate change projections by constituency over Great Britain

The data shown here is taken from Copernicus' Interactive Climate Atlas, which is a constantly updated version of the IPCC's Climate Atlas. You can see both the recently observed change and projected changes expected over the coming years to which we'll need to adapt.

The future projections show only the average of an ensemble called 'EuroCORDEX', which downscales a range of different global projections using an international collection of regional climate models that all use a common spatial grid of roughly 11km over Europe. The projections use a scenario of global carbon emissions called "RCP4.5", which is roughly the trajectory that we're following. However as they only show climate changes in the near-term, the impact of the scenario is pretty minimal as they're mainly set by our past emssions. To measure climate rather than weather, you need to average over multiple years. The past changes show the difference between the 30 year periods centred on the 2000s and the 1970s. The near-term future projections show the difference between conditions averaged over 2021-2040 and those averaged over 1981-2010.

The variables that are currently available to look at are:

• annual temperature
• winter rainfall (technically this is precipitation, so it also factors in snowfall)
• summer rainfall
• number of consecutive days without rain per year
• maximum temperature on the warmest day of the year
• rain falling over the wettest 5 days of the year - related to river flooding

This analysis of projections was initially undertaken by Georgia Willits as part of her dissertation research for her Climate Change MSc at UCL Geography. It's since been taken on by Prof. Chris Brierley. The hexmap code was written by Open Innovations and deployed for this webpage by Hannah Woodward. You can see the code used to make this webpage on GitHub.