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

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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.