The Met Office is planning a new heatwave definition for the climate change era
The recent bout of hot weather was deemed to be a “hotspell” not a “heatwave”.
By India Bourke
When is a hotspell a heatwave? It’s a question the UK’s Met Office say is still not settled.
Speaking in the latest session of the Environmental Audit Committee’s Heatwaves inquiry, the Met Office’s Dr Peter Stott confirmed that there is no “universally agreed definition of a heatwave”.
The present definition used by the World Meteorological Organisation requires the average daily temperature to exceed the normal maximum temperature by five degrees celcius, for more than five consecutive days. It calculates the normal temperature using the period between 1961-1990.
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The creation of any such definition is complicated, however, by global climate change. “The impacts of warming become increasingly more significant as we go above two degrees [rise above pre-industrial levels],” Dr Stott told the committee.
The Met Office is working with the EU-funded Helix project to “look at the impacts of different warming levels”, Stott added. Their models for continental European summers predict that large scale temperature anomalies will become a regular occurrence by the middle of the century.
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