Event Attribution and the Precipitation Record for England and Wales
22 Pages Posted: 11 Mar 2017
Date Written: March 8, 2017
Abstract
A month by month analysis of the precipitation record for England and Wales at an annual time scale for the 251-year study period 1766-2016 does not show the patterns in the data implied by the proposition that global warming has increased the amount and variance of precipitation such that the autumn floods of 2000 in England and Wales can be explained in terms of these effects. These results are inconsistent with the finding of event attribution analysis that the autumn 2000 floods in England and Wales are attributable to fossil fuel emissions and they imply that these floods can be explained as probabilistic outcomes of random natural variability.
Keywords: hydrology, precipitation, time series, dependence, persistence, global warming, climate change, carbon emissions, extreme weather, heat waves, droughts, floods, probabilistic event attribution, PEA
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