Sean Spratley - April 21

Weather and Climate Systems Seminar   Investigating the connections between Aerosol emissions and their effects on Severe Weather Events in the Southern Great Plains   Sean Spratley Wednesday, April 21st 2:00 pm   Join Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/jdv-kpfr-gnu Severe weather forecasting is important for mitigating risk to human life, but it

Start

April 21, 2021 - 2:00 pm

End

April 21, 2021 - 3:00 pm

Weather and Climate Systems Seminar

 

Investigating the connections between Aerosol emissions and their effects on Severe Weather Events in the Southern Great Plains

 

Sean Spratley

Wednesday, April 21st

2:00 pm

 

Join Google Meet:

https://meet.google.com/jdv-kpfr-gnu

Severe weather forecasting is important for mitigating risk to human life, but it is also very difficult and complex.  Although much research has been done to improve our understanding of this area, there continue to be many unknown aspects regarding parameterizations and assumptions that can lead to uncertainty in the forecast models.  Recent investigations have pointed to multi-faceted impacts of aerosols on severe weather, but this area continues to be one that is not understood very well.

This research focuses on whether aerosols may have led to any significantly underperforming severe weather forecasts in the Southern Great Plains (SGP) region from the 2015-2019 time frame.  These significantly underperforming cases were determined by comparing the daily number of severe weather reports to the total areas outlined in severe weather risks in Storm Prediction Center (SPC) outlooks.  Of particular interest was whether there was a difference in impact between aerosols generated by a local source and aerosols arriving via long-range transport.  This presentation primarily discusses the data used in this research, including outlook and storm report data from the SPC, sounding data used to calculate severe weather parameters, and satellite data used to determine aerosol events.  Future work will involve determining any statistically significant correlations between aerosol measurements and severe weather parameters.  It will also involve determining the days on which a significantly underperforming severe weather forecast occurred simultaneously with a large concentration of aerosols.  These days will be examined further for any aerosol-weather interactions that may have impacted severe weather occurrence.