Met Office
Lizzie Kendon is Strategic Head of Climate Processes and Projections at Met Office Hadley Centre, and is also Professor of Climate Science at Bristol University. She has pioneered the field of km-scale climate modelling, including the first km-scale climate simulations over Europe and Africa, and led the delivery of the first national climate scenarios at km-scale “UKCP Local”. Her work focusses on gaining a better understanding of extreme rainfall processes and their future change, and exploiting new high-resolution modelling capability for informing adaptation. She currently is a co-lead on the REPRESA project, funded by FCDO and IDRC under the CLARE initiative, on resilience and preparedness to tropical cyclones over southern Africa. She also leads the NERC funded FUTURE-FLOOD project, which is providing new estimates of compound flood hazard across the UK. She is senior supplier for AI work for climate at the UK Met Office, looking to pull through new AI methods to improve climate change projections.
Plenary 3. Thursday 3 July. 13.00-15.00 – Climate extremes, impacts and adaptation
At the UK Met Office we have run climate simulations at km-scale over the UK, Europe, Africa and South America. This includes the first continuous 100-year ensemble projections at 2.2km resolution over the UK ( ‘UKCP Local’), and 4.5km ensemble projections over Africa. These km-scale models better represent small-scale processes in the atmosphere, such as convection, and are a key advance in model capability for understanding future changes in local weather extremes. In this talk I will highlight new understanding of changes in heavy rainfall, convective storm hazards and tropical cyclones, with implications for flooding and adaptation planning.