Climate is a complex physical and dynamical system that is being increasingly accurately modeled at large scales by GCMs. However, it frequently remains necessary to use downscaling tools to describe climate on scales suitable for impact analyses. Downscaling tools have been extensively applied and evaluated for hydrological and thermal parameters. However, although trends in near surface flow regimes have long been acknowledged as having particular importance for climate change impacts on society, tools have not yet been fully developed or evaluated which can be used to derive highly spatially discriminated flow climatologies for current or future conditions. Hence, we present evidence for evolution of near-surface flow over northern Europe, an evaluation of the near-surface flow regime as manifest in simulations conducted using HadCM3, and a preliminary comparison of downscaling tools for flow regimes.