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Online climate change projections report 4 Seasonal climate change

This chapter has three purposes. Firstly, it gives some key findings of seasonal changes to climate, at national level and for each of the administrative regions, for the most widely used variables.

Secondly, it shows examples of the probabilistic projections of change which can be obtained from the User Interface. For many users, the maps and diagrams in the UKCIP02 Science Report acted as their main access to the scenarios, and provided them with all they needed. In UKCP09 the amount of information available, and its complexity, is substantially greater. For this reason, a comprehensive set of pre-prepared maps and graphs can be seen on the UKCP09 website, which provides many more illustrations of UKCP09 results than can be shown in a report — for example, maps for other future time periods and emissions scenarios. However, because pre-prepared graphics are not always sufficient, a User Interface has been developed which will create additional graphics and data to user specifications. This chapter will show some examples of the various maps which can be generated by the User Interface, focussing mainly on projected changes in seasonal means of some temperature and precipitation variables.

Thirdly, it compares various of change to show how they differ for different future time periods, emissions scenarios, and and temporal averaging choices, using temperature and precipitation variables as examples. These comparisons, which are listed in Table 4.3, are designed to help users in deciding which choices to make from the possibilities that the User Interface presents. Understanding them is fundamental to their proper use.

As discussed in Chapter 3, it has not been possible to derive probabilistic projections of changes in latent heat flux, snowfall rate and soil moisture; these variables are discussed at the end of this chapter.

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