A set of ensemble climate projections for the physical marine environment of the Northwest European Shelf Seas (NWS), with a consistent present day control simulation. This data set updates the Maritime INdustries Environmental Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (MINERVA) projections, and is consistent with global climate model simulations performed as part of the United Kingdom’s Climate Projections of 2018 (UKCP18).

The UKCP18 Perturbed Parameter Ensemble (PPE) of the Met Office Global Coupled model version 3.05 (HadGEM3-GC3.05) has been downscaled with a North West European Shelf seas climate configuration of the Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) Coastal Ocean model. The UKCP18 HadGEM3-GC3.05 PPE was designed to span the range of uncertainty associated with model parameter uncertainty in the atmosphere of the driving global climate model. Each of the 12 PPE ensemble members have been downscaled as transient simulation for the period 1990-2098 under the RCP8.5 climate change scenario. We refer to the downscaled ensemble as the North West Shelf Perturbed Parameter Ensemble (NWSPPE).

The NEMO configuration for NWSPPE has a horizontal resolution of 7 km with 51 vertical levels using terrain-following s-coordinates. This data collection includes 2D fields of monthly mean output over the full simulation period for every ensemble member, as well as pre-processed climatologies and ensemble statistics (for an early-century (2000-2019) and late-century (2079-2098) period). Regional mean time series are also included for each ensemble member at monthly time resolution.

A 200-year “present day” control simulation (for the year 2000) has also been downscaled with the shelf seas climate version of the NEMO Coastal Ocean model. HadGEM3 GC3.05 was run for 200 years with the atmospheric constituents fixed to the values of the year 2000. The present-day control simulation provides an estimate of the internal variability in the climate system that can arise in the absence of time-varying external forcings. Details of this simulation, which formed part of the core UKCP18 project, are available in Tinker et al. (2020).

These projections represent an update to the MINERVA projections, designed to provide a new and complementary evidence base to inform the fourth UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4) and other climate change studies. While they use updated modelling systems and techniques, and represent a much larger dataset, the projections are structurally the same. These projections include Sea Surface, Near Bed, and the Difference between the surface and bed Temperature and Salinity (SST, NBT, DFT, SSS, NBS, DFS), Potential Energy Anomaly (PEA), Mixed Layer Depth (MLD), the barotropic currents (their U and V components (DMU, DMV), as well as their magnitude, DMUV).