CAREER: Variability of Severe Convective Storm Mode and Hazards as a Function of Environment and Pre-convective Updraft Forcing

While decades of study have led to greatly improved scientific understanding and forecasts of severe thunderstorms, they continue to present a substantial threat to life and property in the United States each year. These storms come in various types or “modes” that differ in the type and severity of the hazards they produce, but otherwise form in similar environments.

In particular, discrete, rotating storms known as supercells produce the most severe tornadoes and largest hail, but the environmental conditions in which they form are very similar to those that support severe squall lines, which tend to produce large swaths of damaging straight-line winds. How a given severe weather scenario plays out also depends on poorly understood details of the early stages of storm development.

For these reasons it remains difficult to anticipate which modes will be dominant leading up to a given severe weather event. Using many sophisticated computer simulations and comparing them with the behavior of real-world storms, this project will investigate how severe storm mode depends on the details of early storm development across a range of different environments.

The results of this investigation will aid forecasters in their ability to discriminate between environments and details of early storm development that are most likely to produce a given storm mode and its associated severe weather. An additional aspect of this project is the application of emerging and affordable virtual reality technology to the simulation results to visualize the complex 3D structures of these storms.

These platforms will be leveraged to develop interactive educational spaces designed to engage students from a high school to college level, with a particular emphasis on those students from underrepresented minorities and economically disadvantaged groups.

The first goal of this project is to fill a major gap in our understanding of how severe convective storms (SCS) develop, persist, and produce severe hazards as a function of their large-scale environment (LSE), the small-scale details of their initiation and interaction, and the links between them. Using a large suite of idealized storm-scale numerical simulations, this project will 1) investigate the sensitivity of SCS mode to the morphology of convective initiation across a range of LSE’s, 2) determine the role of convective cold pools in modulating supercell vs.

QLCS modes in different LSE’s, and 3) investigate the variability of tornado development, longevity, and intensity as a function of storm mode and LSE. More broadly, results of this study will improve our understanding of how mid-latitude continental convection operates within the climate system and will help inform future avenues in the modeling of past, present, and future climate.

The other goal of this study is to develop interactive virtual reality-based 3D visualizations of simulated storms to make their complex structure and behavior more accessible and intuitive to students and researchers alike. This effort aims to increase public engagement with and ultimately broaden the diversity of the STEM community. It will specifically target both the undergraduate classroom and develop outreach events to high schools with a large proportion of underrepresented minorities and economically disadvantaged students.

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.