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、破坏性风和冰雹，每年都对生命和财产构成重大威胁。HCW事件规模小，持续时间短，即使提前几个小时预测也非常困难。然而，它们往往在某些更大规模的环境中优先形成和发展，主要是在全球少数地理区域，其中最突出的是美国东部。为什么这些潜在的致命的大规模环境被限制在这些特定的地区还不是很清楚。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在年际和几十年时间尺度上的变化的能力。本研究项目旨在研究促成HCW事件产生的有利环境的因素（如陆海对比、上游高架地形及其对大气急流的干扰）。由于仅使用观测和真实的建模模拟很难解开造成HCW环境的特定物理机制，因此pi将使用降低复杂性的模型进行一系列实验，在这些模型中，陆地和地形的总体表示是在各种复杂配置下施加的。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，以捕捉恶劣天气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。这项工作在总体意义上进行预测，重点关注HCW活动如何随大规模条件而变化。目标是预测HCW环境如何变化，进而预测相关的社会影响，包括生命损失和财产损失，每年、十年、十年甚至更长时间内可能发生的变化。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.