posted on 2015-07-28, 15:13authored byTom Matthews, Conor Murphy, Robert WilbyRobert Wilby, Shaun Harrigan
The British-Irish Isles (BI) lie beneath the North Atlantic storm track year-round and thus are impacted by the passage of extra-tropical cyclones. Given recent extreme storminess and projections of enhanced winter cyclone activity for this region, there is much interest in assessing the extent to which the cyclone climate of the region may be changing. We address this by assessing a 142-year (1871-2012) record of cyclone frequency, intensity and 'storminess' derived from the 20th Century Reanalysis V2 (20CR) dataset. We also use this long-term record to examine associations between cyclone activity and regional hydroclimate. Our results confirm the importance of cyclone frequency in driving seasonal precipitation totals which we find to be greatest during summer months. Cyclone frequency and storminess are characterized by pronounced interannual and multi-decadal variability which are strongly coupled to atmospheric blocking in the Euro-Atlantic region, but we detect no evidence of an increasing trend. We observe an upward trend in cyclone intensity for the BI region, which is strongest in winter and consistent with model projections, but promote caution interpreting this given the changing data quality in the 20CR over time. Nonetheless, we assert that long-term reconstruction is helpful for contextualizing recent storminess and for identifying emerging changes in regional hydroclimate linked to cyclones.
History
Department
Geography and Environment
Published in
International Journal of Climatology
Volume
36
Issue
3
Citation
MATTHEWS, T.K.R. ... et al, 2015. A cyclone climatology of the British-Irish Isles 1871-2012. International Journal of Climatology, 36(3), pp. 1299–1312.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2015-07-06
Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: MATTHEWS, T.K.R. ... et al, 2015. A cyclone climatology of the British-Irish Isles 1871-2012. International Journal of Climatology, 36(3), pp. 1299–1312., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/joc.4425. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.