A collection of blogs and short articles by HRCM scientists that focus on recently published and ongoing research.
Recent progress in simulating North Atlantic weather regimes
Weather and Climate @ Reading | 5th October, 2020
Weather is chaotic. One way to make sense of this variability is by identifying so-called weather regimes. How well global climate models reproduce North Atlantic weather regimes is key to simulating European climate, including cyclones and other high-impact events. Read on...
High-resolution insights into future European winters
Weather and Climate @ Reading | 21st October, 2019
Most of Europe’s winter rainfall is brought by extratropical cyclones, steered our way by the North Atlantic jet stream. Understanding the jet’s response to future climate change is vital to understanding of future European hydroclimate. High-resolution global modelling may be key to this. Read on...
North Atlantic post-tropical cyclones
Weather and Climate @ Reading | 7th January, 2019
A topic of ongoing research is historical variability of North Atlantic post-tropical cyclones. These are tropical storms that travel into the mid-latitudes, bringing hurricane-force winds and heavy rainfall to parts of Europe and North America that are potentially less prepared for these hazards. Read on...
Where do China’s monsoon rains come from?
Research blog | 16th January, 2017
The vagaries of the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) impact the world’s most populous region. Understanding what drives monsoon precipitation variability is essential not only for predicting how the EASM will respond to future, anthropogenic climate change, but also for developing adaptation strategies on which agricultural communities will increasingly rely. Read on...
Characterising extreme event occurrence
Weather and Climate @ Reading | 16th May, 2016
When presented with a new data sample, the first thing many of us scientists do is to characterise it in terms of two numbers: the average or mean value of the sample, and the spread or variance of the sample values around the mean. This has become second nature and we rarely stop to think twice about it. Yet it is indeed quite remarkable that data as different as Reading summer temperatures, the chest circumference of Scottish soldiers, or the sum of points obtained by rolling several identical dice can all be characterised by just these two numbers. Read on...
Is it possible to predict inter-annual changes in terrestrial water storage at regional scales?
Weather and Climate @ Reading | 18th January, 2016
The hydrological cycle is a fundamental link between components of the Earth System: atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. It is mainly driven by solar energy, is strongly influenced by the ocean, and involves complex interactive processes that drive the movement of water at various time and spatial scales. This complexity, together with a lack of homogeneous and accurate global observational datasets, compounds the difficulty climate modellers encounter in simulating the hydrological cycle with global climate models (GCM). This leads to large uncertainties in predictions of changes in the hydrological cycle. Read on...