CAREER: Toward a Global Understanding of Severe Convective Environments

强对流风暴（SCS）产生破坏性的冰雹，强烈的阵风和龙卷风，可导致重大损失，受伤和死亡。它们对除南极洲以外的所有大陆都构成威胁。目前对南海的观测非常稀疏，数据记录有限。因此，我们对全球范围内SCS发生的地点、原因和频率的了解还很缺乏。为了解决这些困难，从促进SCS发展的大气条件（即有利环境）中获得的参数已被用于评估SCS可能性。如果没有这些环境，发展中的风暴将很难成为南海。随着人口中心的不断扩大，以及随着气候变暖，有利的环境变得更加频繁，预计南海的影响将会增加。该提案旨在描述地球仪上有利环境的发展以及全球变暖如何影响其发展。在揭示全球南海形成的潜力的同时，这项研究可能会改善南海预测，并有助于管理南海的风险和暴露。除了对学生进行研究培训外，这项工作还将开发互动教育内容和在线教学模块，以提高公众对SCS所构成威胁的认识。总体研究目标是分析全球有利环境出现的频率，并评估它们是否会在气候变暖时发生一致变化。研究人员将评估现有再分析的能力，以表征不同地区和天气状况的有利环境。他们将评估有利的南海环境的全球可能性，并量化潜在的天气和中尺度过程。最后，他们将在全球变暖预测的高分辨率模拟中讨论这些有利环境如何变化。为此，这项研究可以提供一个新的和基本的理解的潜在的频率和过程，导致南海的发展，并在以前未探索的决议，以应对气候变暖。该项目将研究与教育相结合，重点关注为SCS和气候变化教育带来全球视角，并通过开发互动教育资源和在线模块，提高对财产、农业和人类风险的理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Severe convective storms (SCS) produce damaging hail, intense wind gusts, and tornadoes that can result in significant losses, injuries, and fatalities. They pose a threat on every continent except Antarctica. Current observations of SCS are very sparse, and data records are limited. As such, our knowledge of where, why, and how often SCS occur globally is lacking. To address these difficulties, parameters derived from atmospheric conditions that foster SCS development (that is, favorable environments) have been used to assess SCS likelihood. Without these environments, developing storms will struggle to become SCS. The impacts of SCS are expected to grow with sprawling population centers and as favorable environments become more frequent with the warmer climate. This proposal aims to characterize the development of favorable environments across the globe and how global warming affects their development. While shedding light on the potential for SCS formation worldwide, this research may improve SCS forecasts and help manage risks and exposures to SCS. In addition to training students in research, the work will develop interactive educational contents and online instructional modules to raise public awareness to the threats posed by SCS.The overarching research objective is to analyze the frequency at which favorable environments occur globally and assess whether they will change uniformly in a warming climate. The investigators will evaluate the capacity of available reanalyses to characterize favorable environments in different regions and weather regimes. They will assess the global likelihood of favorable SCS environments and quantify the underlying synoptic and mesoscale processes. Lastly, they will address how these favorable environments change in high-resolution simulations of global warming projections. To this end, this research can provide a new and fundamental understanding of the underlying frequency and processes leading to the SCS development and in response to a warming climate at previously unexplored resolutions. Integrating research and education, this proposal will focus on bringing a global perspective to SCS and climate change education, and improve the understanding of risk to property, agriculture and people by developing interactive educational resources and online modules.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.