Collaborative Research: Understanding the Origins of Hazardous Convective Weather Environments through Reduced-complexity Climate Modeling Experiments

危险的对流天气（HCW），包括龙卷风，破坏性的风和冰雹，每年都对生命和财产构成重大风险。HCW事件规模小，持续时间短，这使得即使提前几个小时预测其发生也非常困难。然而，它们通常在某些较大规模的环境中优先形成和发展，主要在全球少数地理区域，其中最突出的是美国东部。为什么这些可能致命的大规模环境仅限于这些特定的区域还没有得到很好的理解。这种知识的缺乏极大地限制了我们预测这些事件对社会构成的风险在年际和数十年时间尺度上如何变化的能力。该研究项目旨在研究有利于HCW事件生成的环境因素（如陆地-海洋对比，上游高架地形及其对大气急流的干扰）。由于很难单独使用观察和真实建模模拟来解开负责HCW环境的特定物理机制，PI将使用降低复杂性的模型进行一系列实验，其中土地和地形的总体表示在各种复杂性配置下进行。该项目旨在加强对与对流天气有关的自然灾害的基本过程的了解。 它旨在通过确定模型中必须包含的关键要素来提高我们模拟天气灾害的能力，以捕捉HCW的分布及其构成的风险。 这项工作从总体意义上解决了预测问题，重点是HCW活动可能如何随着大规模条件而变化。 其目标是预测HCW环境以及相关的社会影响（包括生命损失和财产损失）可能每年、十年乃至更长时间发生的变化。该项目将培养研究生和博士后科学家，他们将在未来为新兴的危险对流天气和气候领域做出贡献。

Hazardous convective weather (HCW), including tornadoes, damaging wind, and hail, poses significant risk to life and property each year. HCW events are small scale with short duration time, which makes it extremely difficult to predict their occurrence even a few hours in advance. However, they do often form and develop preferentially within certain larger-scale environments and primarily in a few geographical regions globally, the most prominent of which is the Eastern United States. Why these potentially deadly larger-scale environments are confined to such specific regions is not well understood. This lack of knowledge greatly limits our ability to predict how the risk posed to society by these events vary on inter-annual and multi-decadal timescales. This research project aims to examine the factors (such as land-sea contrasts, elevated terrain upstream, and their interferences with atmospheric jet streams) that contribute to environments favorable for the generation of HCW events. Because it is difficult to disentangle specific physical mechanisms that are responsible for HCW environments using observations and realistic modeling simulations alone, the PIs will perform a series of experiments using reduced-complexity models where gross representations of land and terrain are imposed under various complexity configurations. The project is designed to enhance understanding of the fundamental processes underlying the natural hazards associated with convective weather. It aims to improve our capability to model weather hazards by determining the key elements that must be included in models to capture the distribution of HCWs and the risks they pose. The work addresses forecasting in an aggregate sense, focusing on how HCW activity is likely to change with large-scale conditions. The goal is to predict how HCW environments and, in turn, how the associated societal impacts, including loss of life and property damage, may change from year to year, decade to decade, and beyond. The project will train graduate student and post-doctoral scientists who will make future contributions to the burgeoning field of hazardous convective weather and climate.