Eastern Scotland is experiencing more frequent and larger extreme rainfall events, which could have serious implications for local communities, including an increased risk of flooding. This will be the main message of a Macaulay Institute seminar being given next Wednesday (9 February) by Dr Hayley Fowler, Senior Research Fellow at Newcastle University’s School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences.

Research undertaken by Dr Fowler and her colleagues has shown that the chance of a long duration (10 day) extreme rainfall event occurring in Eastern Scotland has increased by a factor of four during the 1990s compared to the previous 30 years.

“Increasing flood risk is now recognized as the most important sectoral threat from climate change in most parts of the world. The recent repeated severe flooding in the UK and Europe has caused major loss of property and life, and the insurance industry is now threatening to withdraw flood insurance cover from millions of UK households.

“Climate model integrations predict increases in both the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall in the high latitudes, such as northern Scotland, under enhanced greenhouse conditions which would be expected to cause an increased risk of flooding. These projections are consistent with recent increases in rainfall intensity seen in the UK and worldwide.

“It is clear from our research that there have been significant changes to both the timing and occurrence of multi-day intense rainfall events over the past decade. Annual recurrence probabilities have quadrupled in some regions, with intensities previously experienced every 25 years now occurring at six year intervals. This is particularly apparent in Scotland, with a 50-year return period event during the 1961 to 1990 period being reduced to an 8-, 11- and 25-year event in eastern, southern and northern Scotland regions respectively during the 1990s.

“There have also been changes in timing, with extreme events now occurring predominantly in the autumn months. These climatic changes may be explained by persistent atmospheric circulation anomalies and have huge economic and social implications in terms of increased flooding.”

Anyone interested in attending this Wednesday’s Macaulay seminar should contact Jane Lund on tel: 01224 498200, email:j.lund@macaulay.ac.uk.

The Macaulay Institute is the premier land use research institute in the UK. Two hundred and seventy staff are based at the Macaulay Institute at Craigiebuckler in Aberdeen. The Macaulay Institute aims to be an international leader in research on the use of rural land resources for the benefit of people and the environment and is involved in research across the globe; from Scotland to Chile and China. More about the Macaulay Institute can be found at www.macaulay.ac.uk .

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Dr Hayley Fowler

Dr Hayley Fowler is a senior research scientist in the Water Resource Systems Research Laboratory, School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University where she has worked for four years.

Her research has concentrated on the impacts of climate change and variability upon water resources, the development of sophisticated weather-driven stochastic rainfall models, observed climatic variability and the analysis of extremes of rainfall for both current and future climates in relation to both flooding and severe drought events.

She has been a member of the main committee of the British Hydrological Society since 2004. In the last four years, she has published 10 journal papers, 14 conference papers and three research reports on climate variability and change in the European region. She is presently involved in several UK Research Council funded projects and principal investigator on the EC FP6 AquaTerra project, specialising in the production of climate change scenarios and impact methodologies.

The Water Resource Systems Research Laboratory

The Water Resource Systems Research Laboratory (WRSRL), rated 5* in the last Research Assessment Exercise, is based in the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. WRSRL is a leading international research centre, with eight academic staff, 10-12 research staff and 20-25 research students. WRSRL research aims to develop new modelling technologies for planning a sustainable water environment; to this end WRSRL has pioneered the fields of hydroinformatics, stochastic modelling of precipitation in space and time, climate change impact assessment and physically-based hydrological modelling.

A series of climate change projects have been coordinated by WRSRL including the EC Projects: WRINCLE (Water Resources: Influence of Climate change in Europe); SWURVE (Sustainable Water: Uncertainty, Risk and Vulnerability in Europe); POPSICLE (Production of Precipitation Scenarios for Impact Assessment of Climate change in Europe). WRSRL has strong national, international and multi-disciplinary collaborations through a wide portfolio of UK Research Council, EU and industrially-sponsored research.