Atmospheric Rivers and Their Correlation with Severe Weather Events

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are a relatively common phenomenon that carry huge amounts of water vapor over a long distance in a concentrated moisture plume. More formally, an AR is defined by the low-level horizontal transfer of water vapor along a long filament ahead of a cold front, with the minimum criteria of it having an integrated vapor transport (IVT) of 250 kg•m^-1•s^-1. Frequently, ARs bring beneficial rainfall to the land they hit, especially for the US West coast, but they are often studied for their occasional deleterious impacts such as flooding. With such intense focus of research on ARs causing flooding and affecting the US West coast, other geographic locations and types of impacts are often underrepresented. For example, there are few studies of ARs over the US Southeast, and there are few studies that look into AR impacts beyond rain and flooding. Our research focuses on severe weather events over the US Southeast, and attempts to offer a preliminary view on if ARs hold any influence on them. In order to do so, storm report data from 2021 will be taken manually from the SPC storm report database, and processed in Python to get areal extents for severe weather outbreaks over the US Southeast. Then another database will be used to overlay IVT (or a proxy for IVT) over the outbreak areas in order to get a tentative qualitative correlation between AR’s and severe weather events. In doing this study, our paper hopes to expand the perception of AR’s and think of them beyond their obvious impacts of rain and flooding.