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

包括龙卷风、破坏性大风和冰雹在内的危险对流天气每年都会给生命和财产带来巨大的风险。HCW事件规模小、持续时间短，即使提前几个小时也很难预测其发生。然而，它们往往是在某些较大的环境中优先形成和发展的，主要是在全球几个地理区域，其中最突出的是美国东部。为什么这些潜在的致命的更大规模的环境被限制在如此特定的地区，人们还不太清楚。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如何在年际和数十年时间尺度上变化的能力。本研究项目的目的是研究有利于高湿天气事件发生的环境因素(如海陆对比、上游高地地形及其与大气急流的干扰)。由于仅使用观测和真实建模模拟很难理清造成HCW环境的特定物理机制，PI将使用降低复杂性的模型执行一系列实验，其中在各种复杂配置下强加土地和地形的总体表示。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。它的目的是通过确定模型中必须包括的关键要素以捕捉人道主义工作者的分布及其构成的风险，从而提高我们模拟天气灾害的能力。这项工作涉及总体意义上的预测，重点是HCW活动可能如何随着大规模条件的变化而变化。其目标是预测卫生和环境卫生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、十年到十年乃至更长时间内如何变化。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.