Revisiting the dynamic and thermodynamic processes driving the record-breaking January 2014 precipitation in the southern UK.

Many attribution studies of precipitation extreme events have attempted to estimate the thermodynamic contribution (linked to temperature changes) and the dynamic contribution (linked to the atmospheric circulation). Those studies are based on statistical decompositions of atmospheric fields, and essentially focus on the horizontal motion of the atmosphere. This paper proposes a framework that decomposes those terms from first physical principles, which include the vertical atmospheric motion that has often been overlooked.