Climate change and rising global temperatures could be to blame for future flash floods in the United Kingdom, as per the new announcement.
The Met Office and Newcastle University in England report predictions of flooding and extreme weather events in southern areas of England have been underestimated. Forecasters at the organization believe their nation will soon be the target of more frequent incidents of extreme weather.
Researchers predict rivers in the UK will begin to overflow their banks in the next 85 years, as global temperatures continue to rise.
Traditional climate models of England study detail on square areas roughly 12.5 miles on a side. This research increases the level of detail to just 1.25 miles on each edge, providing 100 square units for each one in traditional models. Predictions were created concerning hourly storms, which could potentially create flash floods.
Intense rainfall could become more frequent as temperatures rise. By the year 2100, the Met Office believes, summers will be drier, abbreviated by more frequent, but shorter downpours of rain than today.
The climate model was based on two 13-year periods. One is on current temperatures and conditions, the other on expected conditions around the year 2100.
"The changes we have found are consistent with increases we would expect in extreme rainfall with increasing temperatures and will mean more flash floods," Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University's School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, said.
Rising global temperatures would allow the atmosphere to absorb greater quantities of water as the century progresses. This additional moisture would eventually fall out of the atmosphere, often in the form of extreme storms.
Winters will become wetter as temperatures rise, with greater precipitation during cooler months, the Met Office predicted.
"However, the 1.5 km model also shows a future intensification of short-duration rain in summer, with significantly more events exceeding the high thresholds indicative of serious flash flooding," researchers wrote in an article announcing the new study.
Only the southern half of the United Kingdom was modeled, in order to save computer resources. The simulation still contained so much data; it took one of the world's most powerful supercomputers nine months to complete the program.
"We need to understand about possible changes to summer and winter rainfall so we can make informed decisions about how to manage these very different flooding risks in the future," Newcastle researchers stated in a university press release.
Investigation of the role of global warming on flash floods and extreme weather events in the United Kingdom was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
