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Latent heat flux

Latent heat flux is the movement of heat from the Earth's surface to the atmosphere that is associated with evaporation or transpiration.

In detail

Previous UK climate scenarios (e.g. UKCIP02) provided projections of changes in latent heat flux. For UKCP09, creating probabilistic projections of changes in latent heat flux were not possible because projected changes from two of the alternative climate models were often found to be well outside the range of the Met Office model variants. In this situation, our method of combining results from the Met Office model variants and the alternative models could not be guaranteed to provide a robust indication of the probabilities of different outcomes, and hence PDFs were not provided.

In the absence of a UKCP09 probabilistic projection for latent heat flux, there are three possible alternative sources of projections of transient changes during the 21st century:

  • the 17-member ensemble of variants of the Met Office GCM
  • the 11-member ensemble of variants of the Met Office RCM
  • the ensemble of other global climate models, available as part of the CMIP3 project

Data from the first two (Met Office GCM and RCM) is available from the Climate Impacts LINK project, operated by . In the case of latent heat flux, the use of changes from the 11-member Met Office RCM ensemble is recommended in the first instance.

  • For variables for which probabilistic projections could not be provided, go to Section 5.10 of the UKCP09 Briefing report, with more details in Section 4.8 of the UKCP09 Climate change projections report.
  • More details about the climate models used are given in Box 2.1 of the UKCP09 Climate change projections report. A commentary about the strengths and weaknesses of climate models is given in Annex 3.
  • For an overview of how probabilistic projections are created and presented, see Box 3 of the UKCP09 Briefing report. More details are in Chapter 3 of the UKCP09 Climate change projections report, including an overview of the methodology in Section 3.2.12.
  • Recent trends in wind speed are presented in Chapter 2 of the Observed trends report. Information about extreme gusts in the UK is available from the UKCP09 Extremes atlas.

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