Drivers of the 2013/14 winter floods in the UK

Abstract

In this section we give the simple maps and scatter plots that demonstrate the lack of connections between the drivers mentioned in Huntingford et al1 and southern England rainfall in the historical record. The maps are based on CRU TS 3.222, which does not include the winter of 2013/2014. Grid points with p-values larger than 0.1 are left white, which implies that roughly 10% of the maps should be coloured by pure chance if there is no connection at all. The scatter plots use the CRU TS 3.22 rainfall averaged over the area 51–52N, 6.5W–2E. January and February 2014 have been obtained from the E-OBS dataset3 with a small bias correction determined over the overlap period (r=0.97). In the scatter plots, the winter of 2013/2014 is shown but not used to calculate the correlations and regressions. All plots have been made using the publicly available web application KNMI Climate Explorer (climexp.knmi.nl).