TY - JOUR
T1 - Future changes in hail occurrence in the United States determined through convection-permitting dynamical downscaling
AU - Trapp, Robert J.
AU - Hoogewind, Kimberly A.
AU - Lasher-Trapp, Sonia
N1 - Acknowledgments. We acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers for providing comments and suggestions that helped improve this paper, and Dr. Rebecca Adams-Selin for providing the WRF-HAILCAST code used in establishing the hail-category methodology. We also acknowledge the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University for providing computational resources for the downscaling simulations, and Prof. Michael Baldwin at Purdue University for his role in facilitating the simulations. The Purdue Climate Change Research Center provided partial financial support for K.A.H. while she was a student at Purdue University. The downscaling project itself was initiated with support from the National Science Foundation under Grant NSF ATM 0541491. Model data were analyzed using resources from the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the State of Illinois.
PY - 2019/9/1
Y1 - 2019/9/1
N2 - The effect of anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations on the frequency and intensity of hail depends on a range of physical processes and scales. These include the environmental support of the hail-generating convective storms and the frequency of their initiation, the storm volume over which hail growth is promoted, and the depth of the lower atmosphere conducive to melting. Here, we use high-resolution (convection permitting) dynamical downscaling to simultaneously account for these effects. We find broad geographical areas of increases in the frequency of large hail (*35-mm diameter) over the United States, during all four seasons. Increases in very large hail (*50-mm diameter) are mostly confined to the central United States, during boreal spring and summer. And, although increases in moderate hail (*20-mm diameter) are also found throughout the year, decreases occur over much of the eastern United States in summer. Such decreases result from a projected decrease in convective-storm frequency. Overall, these results suggest that the annual U.S. hail season may begin earlier in the year, be lengthened by more than a week, and exhibit more interannual variability in the future.
AB - The effect of anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations on the frequency and intensity of hail depends on a range of physical processes and scales. These include the environmental support of the hail-generating convective storms and the frequency of their initiation, the storm volume over which hail growth is promoted, and the depth of the lower atmosphere conducive to melting. Here, we use high-resolution (convection permitting) dynamical downscaling to simultaneously account for these effects. We find broad geographical areas of increases in the frequency of large hail (*35-mm diameter) over the United States, during all four seasons. Increases in very large hail (*50-mm diameter) are mostly confined to the central United States, during boreal spring and summer. And, although increases in moderate hail (*20-mm diameter) are also found throughout the year, decreases occur over much of the eastern United States in summer. Such decreases result from a projected decrease in convective-storm frequency. Overall, these results suggest that the annual U.S. hail season may begin earlier in the year, be lengthened by more than a week, and exhibit more interannual variability in the future.
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U2 - 10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0740.1
DO - 10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0740.1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85074641049
SN - 0894-8755
VL - 32
SP - 5493
EP - 5509
JO - Journal of Climate
JF - Journal of Climate
IS - 17
ER -