Future Tornado Activity in the contiguous United States using CMIP6 Climate Scenarios

The climate is warming, but the impact on tornado activity is poorly understood in the United States. Here, we use projections from seven global climate models in the CMIP6 archive for the historical, SSP2 4.5, SSP3 7.0, and SSP5 8.5 scenarios. The projections from these scenarios are used to compute convective variables known to influence tornado development such as convective available potential energy (CAPE), convective inhibition (CIN), 0 to 6 km vertical wind shear (S06), and storm relative helicity (SRH). We fit a generalized linear model to the historical data to quantify the relationship between the convective variables and tornado counts across the contiguous United States. Using this model, we project future tornado activity using the convective variables for each of the future climate projections from 2040 to 2060 and 2080 to 2100. This research is a first step at understanding spatial and temporal shifts in tornado activity under the future climate change scenarios outlined in the CMIP6 archive.