Building a Modified Tornado Environment Index to Predict Tornado Activity using CMIP6 Historical Simulations

Severe convective weather is responsible for over half of all billion-dollar disasters in the United States since 1980. Of these severe convective storm types, it is the tornado that is the perhaps most clearly recognizable and locally impactful hazard. The United States experiences more tornado events than any other country in the world, which underscores the importance of making sense of the potential connection between a changing climate and tornado activity. Here, we introduce and explain a statistical modeling framework to predict future tornado activity using convective variable known to influence tornado development (i.e., convective available potential energy, convective, wind shear, and storm relative helicity) through seven global climate models in the CMIP6 archive under the historical scenario (1980–2014). The goal is to help build on the foundational knowledge of convective variables and tornado occurrence, while also providing a predictive model to estimate the magnitude and location of tornado activity under future climate change scenarios (e.g. SSP2 4.6, SSP3 7.0, SSP5 8.4).