Impact of Warmer Sea Surface Temperature on the Global Pattern of Intense Convection: Insights From a Global Storm Resolving Model

Abstract

Intense convection, featuring large vertical motions and water phase changes, has profound consequences for many aspects of atmospheric and climate science. Intense convection is a major source of weather hazards due to its association with heavy rain, damaging winds, and large hail. Worldwide, the daily economic loss related to intense convection is about 108 million US dollars over the period 1970(WMO, 2021. In the context of climate, intense convection plays a critical role in Earth's energy balance, as intense convection modulates radiative balance through its effect on both the incoming solar radiation and the outgoing longwave radiation. Furthermore, intense convection modulates energy transfer dynamically and thermodynamically within the atmosphere.Previous global model studies (e.g., Diffenbaugh et al., 2013) argued that a warming climate is likely to enhance the frequency and intensity of intense convection. The argument, however, is based on the analysis of convective environmental proxies (e.g., low-level wind shear and convective available potential energy [CAPE]), rather than the simulation of the convection itself. This limitation arises because traditional climate models have too coarse a grid to simulate intense convection explicitly. Alternatively, high-resolution regional dynamical downscaling can simulate intense convection explicitly (e.g., Hoogewind et al., 2017). However, those regional studies cannot reveal the full global distribution of intense convection.

Machine‐Learned Climate Model Corrections From a Global Storm‐Resolving Model: Performance Across the Annual Cycle

“…This advance was enabled by the use of the year‐long X‐SHiELD simulation reference data set. The longer‐term goal is to use GSRM simulations in multiple climates (Cheng et al., 2022) to train corrective ML that can be used in climate change simulations, following the template in Clark et al. (2022), who used 25‐km grid reference simulations in multiple climates to this end.…”

“…The convective gravity wave drag scheme is disabled. Cheng et al (2022) describes the exact X-SHiELD configuration used here and some general features of the simulation. The free-running simulation is initialized on 20 October 2019.…”

A Global Survey of Rotating Convective Updrafts in the GFDL X‐SHiELD 2021 Global Storm Resolving Model

“…A complementary analysis of this simulation and a companion warmed‐climate simulation is described in Cheng et al. (2022).…”

“…We use a mixed-layer ocean to compute sea-surface temperature (SST); as per the DYAMOND protocol the SSTs are nudged toward analyzed ECMWF SSTs. A complementary analysis of this simulation and a companion warmed-climate simulation is described in Cheng et al (2022).…”

“…Emerging global storm‐resolving models (GSRMs; Satoh et al., 2019) are ideally suited to give a global picture of rotating convection and its interactions with the large‐scale environment. Previous research (Cheng et al., 2022; Miyamoto et al., 2013; Seiki et al., 2022; Wedi et al., 2020; and references therein) has made some progress on understanding the properties of global explicit convection but not of rotating convection cells.…”