Severe Convective Storms in a Changing Climate

Severe convective storms can produce damaging winds, flash flooding, large hail, and tornadoes, causing extensive damage to the infrastructure and ecosystems and significant losses in economy and human lives. Under a warmer climate, the frequency and intensity of severe convective storms may increase due to the increase in available moisture and atmospheric instability. Accurate short-term predictions and long-term projections of severe convective storms are key for hazard mitigation and climate change preparation. The occurrence and characteristics of these storms may change in response to the changing climate driven by anthropogenic forcing. However, the response of severe convective storms to climate change is complicated and non-uniform across the globe due to the involved multiple processes over a broad range of space and time scales and their interactions with the complex regional environmental factors, which warrant further research.   

This Collection aims to address the multiscale interactions between severe convective storms and the global/regional climate system, exploring physical mechanisms underlying the shifts in the occurrence and characteristics of severe convective storms due to climate change. 

We welcome Original Research articles as well as Reviews and Perspectives in a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:  

• Global/regional climatology and underlying physical mechanisms of severe convective storms such as those produce damaging winds, tornadoes, hail, extreme precipitation, excessive lightning, etc.
• Impacts and attributions of climate change on severe convective storms, e.g., trends of frequency, intensity, duration, behaviors, and structures of these storms.
• Regional variations in the response of severe convective storms to climate change and the underlying controlling factors. 
• Interactions between extensive convective storms like mesoscale convective systems and the large-scale circulations and climate events such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). 
• Process-based understanding of severe convective storms in current and future climates from multiscale perspectives, i.e., the synoptic scale, the mesoscale, and down to the microphysical scale.
• Advances in numerical weather prediction models and the machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques for nowcasting, warning, and predictions of severe convective storms. 
• Future projections of the frequency and characteristics of severe convective storm incorporating emission and land-surface scenarios.
• Socio-economic and environmental impacts of the changes in severe convective storms under anthropogenic climate change.