Milton Keynes Council & United Sustainable Energy Agency
June 2010
UKCP09 was used to undertake a first assessment of the possible vulnerabilities and risks faced by the council services due to climate change by building on the work undertaken to develop the Local Climate Impact Profile (LCLIP).
The use of UKCP09 builds on the Milton Keynes Local Climate Impacts Profile (LCLIP) which documented the impact of extreme events on the council area. The lack of comprehensive data, especially with regards to the meteorological conditions that led to the specific events, did not allow for establishing clear-cut thresholds for all key impacts; it did however help identify the effects of specific meteorological conditions to which the council is most vulnerable.
A table was created to summarise the Key Findings for the South East of England.
Using the LCLIP report as a reference, the UKCP09 Key findings for the South East were utilised to give an overview of the general trends being projected under climate change for the area.
Based on the projected trends and the events to which the council has demonstrated vulnerability in the past, a number of maps were produced through the UKCP09 User interface focussing on key climate variables of significance to Milton Keynes.
Considering the vulnerability that the council has shown to heatwaves in the past, the UKCP09 Threshold Detector was then used to analyse a number of weather generator outputs. This calculation used the heat-wave threshold for the South East of England which is maximum temperature > 31ºC and minimum temperature > 16ºC for two consecutive days. The outputs were then translated into graphs using spreadsheet software.