资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Sub‐daily rainfall extremes have been found to intensify, both from observations and climate model simulations, but much uncertainty remains regarding future changes in the spatial structure of rainfall events. Here future changes in the characteristics of heavy summer rainfall are analyzed by using two sets (1980‐2000, 2060‐2080) of 12‐member 20‐year long convection‐permitting ensemble simulations (2.2km, hourly) over the UK. We investigated how the peak intensity, spatial coverage and the speed of rainfall events will change and how those changes jointly affect hourly extremes at different spatial scales. We found that in addition to the intensification of heavy rainfall events, the spatial extent tends to increase in all three sub‐regions, and by up to 49.3% in the North‐West. These changes act to exacerbate intensity increases in extremes for most of spatial scales (North: 30.2‐34.0%, South: 25.8%). The increase in areal extremes is particularly pronounced for catchments with sizes 20‐500km².