The Impact of Human-Induced Climate Change on Future Tornado Intensity as Revealed Through Multi-Scale Modeling

A novel, multi-scale climate modeling approach is used to show the potential for increases in future tornado intensity due to anthropogenic climate change. Historical warm- and cool-season (WARM and COOL) tornado events are virtually placed in a globally warmed future via the pseudo-global warming method. As hypothesized based on meteorological arguments, the tornadic-storm and associated vortex of the COOL event experiences consistent and robust increases in intensity in an ensemble of imposed climate-change experiments. The tornadic-storm and associated vortex of the WARM event experiences increases in intensity in some of the experiments, but the response is neither consistent nor robust, and is overall weaker than in the COOL event. An examination of environmental parameters provides further support of the disproportionately stronger response in the cool-season event. These results have implications on future tornadoes forming outside of climatologically favored seasons.

Automated summary

A novel multi-scale climate modeling approach is used to demonstrate the potential increase in future tornado intensity due to anthropogenic climate change. The results show consistent and robust increases in intensity for cool-season tornado events, while warm-season tornado events exhibit inconsistent and weaker responses. These findings have implications for tornado formation outside of climatologically favored seasons.