Introduction

Scenarios of climate change for the UK have been published by the United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) in 1998 (Hulme & Jenkins, 1998) and 2002 (Hulme et al. 2002), and in each case the accompanying Scientific Reports have contained an early chapter which discussed observations of global and UK climate trends, to provide an historical context for the future climate change projections. These have been welcomed by users, who have requested a similar feature as part of the report accompanying the next set of scenarios, UKCP09, planned for launch in late 2008, and these are shown in Section 1 of this report.

In addition, following the success of A handbook of climate trends across Scotland published by SNIFFER (Barnett et al. 2006), its was suggested that similar detailed graphics of climatology and trends be included over the whole of the UK, selected to show as many as possible of the same variables as those to appear in the UKCP09 future projections. The addition of these extra maps and graphs would have led to the historical climate chapter dominating the content of UKCP09 Science Report, and hence it was decided that the information should be presented in a separate report; this is the genesis of the present volume. Section 2 of this report shows maps of the baseline 1961–1990 UK climate for a number of variables; similar maps for the period 1971–2000; maps of the difference between these two 30-year periods; maps of changes between 1961–2006; graphs showing smoothed trends of each variable, for each of 14 regions of the UK (those over which future projections will be given in the UKCP09 scenarios) and, finally, a table of seasonal and annual changes over the period 1961–2006 over the same areas.

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