NASA: Global Warming Will Bring More Severe Storms

NEW YORK, New York, August 30, 2007 (ENS) - The most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms, say scientists with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, using a new climate model. The scientsts predict that in a warmer climate, stronger and more severe storms can be expected, but with fewer storms overall.

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms.

NASA scientists say global warming will bring stronger thunderstorms. (Photo courtesy NASA)

It is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including "severe thunderstorms" that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground.

This information can be derived from the temperatures and humidities predicted by a climate computer model, according to the new study published on August 17 in the American Geophysical Union’s journal "Geophysical Research Letters."

"These findings may seem to imply that fewer storms in the future will be good news for disastrous western U.S. wildfires," said Dr. Del Genio, lead author of the study. "But drier conditions near the ground combined with higher lightning flash rates per storm may end up intensifying wildfire damage instead."

"I use satellite and surface-based observations of the current climate to understand the processes that regulate changes in water vapor and clouds," he explained. "Some of these observed changes are relevant to how the same processes will change as we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and thus give us clues as to how climate change may play out."

Dr. Tony Del Genio is a physical scientist with NASA. (Photo courtesy GISS)

This model first was tested against current climate conditions. It was found to represent major known global storm features including the prevalence of lightning over tropical continents such as Africa and, to a lesser extent, the Amazon Basin, and the near absence of lightning in oceanic storms.

The model then was applied to a hypothetical future climate with double the current levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide level and a surface that is an average of five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the current climate.

The study found that continents warm more than oceans and that the altitude at which lightning forms rises to a level where the storms are usually more vigorous.

These effects combine to cause more of the continental storms that form in the warmer climate to resemble the strongest storms we currently experience.

Sparked by lightning, Idaho's Cascade Complex Fire has been burning since July 17, 2007. (Photo courtesy Great Basin National Incident Management Team)

The central and eastern areas of the United States are especially prone to severe storms and thunderstorms that arise when strong updrafts combine with horizontal winds that become stronger at higher altitudes. This combination produces damaging horizontal and vertical winds and is a major source of weather-related casualties.

In the warmer climate simulation there is a small class of the most extreme storms with both strong updrafts and strong horizontal winds at higher levels that occur more often, and thus the model suggests that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common with warming.

The prediction of stronger continental storms and more lightning in a warmer climate is a natural consequence of the tendency of land surfaces to warm more than oceans and for the freezing level to rise with warming to an altitude where lightning-producing updrafts are stronger.

These features of global warming are common to all models, but this is the first climate model to explore the relationship between warming and thunderstorms.

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