UNDERSTANDING THE DRIVERS OF VARIABILITY IN SEVERE CONVECTION: Bringing Together the Scientific and Insurance Communities

The evening poster session showcased an impressive array of graduate, undergraduate, and exploratory research discussing everything from the sensitivity of high-resolution storm simulations to aerosols to assessing the recent downward trend in hail occurrence over China and high-resolution dynamical downscaling of severe thunderstorm environments, as well as different approaches to determine climatological risk and to assess the impacts of soil moisture and the Gulf of Mexico on severe thunderstorm activity to the impact of various climate signals on seasonal forecasts for severe weather. A notable feature in the first session included a fascinating numerical simulation experiment that explored the sensitivity of recent severe thunderstorm events to the influence of a warmed climate, revealing that increasing convective inhibition would generally result in fewer storms, but that when storms did form, the contributions from instability would lead to greater vertical velocity. To revisit a final point from the 2013 meeting, “Where is my seasonal tornado forecast?,” our question following the 2016 workshop has now changed to “What is our seasonal tornado forecast, how can we improve on it, and how can this information be used?” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The organizers acknowledge the support for the workshop from the National Science Foundation, the Willis Research Network, Munich Re, and the Columbia University Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. John T Allen (1), Michael K Tippett (2), Adam H Sobel (3), Chiara Lepore (4) (1) Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia...