Locally relevant scenarios of daily weather variables that represent the best knowledge of the present climate and projections of future climate change are needed by planners and managers to inform management and adaptation to climate change decisions. Information of this kind for the future is only readily available for a few developed country regions of the world. For many less‐developed regions, it is often difficult to fin...

Daily station precipitation totals are used to develop a gridded dataset for the region (14°–40°S, 45°–70°W) on a 0.5° × 0.5° latitude/longitude grid, primarily for comparison with regional climate model ( RCM ) simulations. The gridded dataset covers the period 1961–2000. Much of the paper discusses the quality control of the basic station precipitation series. Although the primary aim of the development has been RCM validati...

Weather typing, based on surface pressure charts, has been one of the principal means of analysis in synoptic climatology. Here, we summarize the history of manual and automated schemes, in the northwest European context, illustrating how the approaches can take advantage of the extended reanalysis products that have recently become available. The British Isles and the associated Lamb weather types (LWTs) are the focus of this...

A regional climate model (RCM) at 25 km resolution, coupled to a simple urban land‐surface scheme has been used to assess the sensitivity of UK urban climates to large‐scale greenhouse gas (GHG) induced climate change, local forcing from urban land use, and anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) resulting from energy use in urban areas. GHG‐induced climate change is similar over both urban and rural land surfaces in the model, suggesti...

Six statistical and two dynamical downscaling models were compared with regard to their ability to downscale seven seasonal indices of heavy precipitation for two station networks in northwest and southeast England. The skill among the eight downscaling models was high for those indices and seasons that had greater spatial coherence. Generally, winter showed the highest downscaling skill and summer the lowest. The rainfall ind...