Historical and Future Projections of Hail Produced by Supercells in the United States

Hail is a well-known hazard for industry assets, infrastructure, and personal property, regularly resulting in tens of billions of dollars in damage each year in the CONUS. Few studies, however, have explicitly examined how hailstorms may change during the 21^st century. This work seeks to quantify the influence of future climate change scenarios on the spatiotemporal characteristics of hail across the CONUS. Specifically, this work examines hail associated with simulated long-lived thunderstorms with a robustly rotating updraft, or supercells. Supercells are particularly efficient at producing large hailstones due to their strong updrafts and are one of the most consistent producers of severe hail, making them an ideal focus for this analysis. A convection-permitting regional climate model is used to dynamically downscale two climate change scenarios from a GCM. This approach explicitly simulates supercells and hail, addressing the ambiguity inherently associated with existing environmental analyses on relatively coarse grids. Preliminary results show a correlation between updraft helicity supercell approximations and simulated hail swaths. It is hypothesized that the late 21^st century simulated supercells and associated hail will have a shift in spatial frequency away from the Great Plains. The temporal shift is hypothesized to be earlier in future simulations, and the intensity of the hail is suspected to have a much more complex and varied regional response in the future epochs compared to the historical epoch.