Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

Deep convective clouds play a crucial role in atmospheric circulation, energy, and water cycle of our climate system. The extreme form of such storms produces weather hazards such as large hail, damaging winds and/or tornadoes, and torrential rainfall, causing significant property damages and economic losses. There is a large lap in our fundamental understanding of environmental factors impacting storm intensity, precipitation, and associated hazards, particularly in impacts on anthropogenic warming and aerosols on severe convective storms. In this talk, I will present our effort in understanding physical factors that impact storm intensity, extreme precipitation, and hailstones associated with (1) land cover and anthropogenic aerosol changes from urbanization and (2) anthropogenic warming. I will focus on the understandings mainly gained from process-level studies with both advanced observations and high-resolution model simulations. The challenges in observing and modeling such deep convective clouds will be discussed.