The response of tropopause-overshooting convection over North America to climate change

This necessitates improved understanding of how tropopause-overshooting convection will respond to a warming climate. A growing body of research indicates that environments conducive to severe thunderstorms will occur more often and be increasingly unstable in the future, but no study has examined how this may be related to increased overshooting.

To rectify this, this study leverages an existing pseudo–global warming (PGW) experiment to evaluate potential future changes in tropopause-overshooting convection over North America. We examine two 10-yr simulations consisting of 1) a retrospective period (2003–12) forced by ERA-Interim initial and boundary conditions (the control simulation) and 2) the same retrospective period with CMIP5 ensemble-mean high-end emission scenario climate changes added to the initial and boundary conditions (the PGW simulation).