Exploring Links Between Biomass Burning Smoke and Tornado Likelihood: from Regional to Large-eddy Scale Simulations (Invited Presentation)

Biomass burning smoke from Central America can have the potential to enhance the likelihood of tornado occurrence and intensity in the SE US by changing the environment where tornadic storms form (Saide et al., GRL 2015). In this presentation we build over this study to further our understanding of these interactions on multiple dimensions: 1) Biomass burning smoke emissions are constrained using an inverse modeling technique to improve the representation of smoke loads and its impacts, 2) The representation of these smoke-tornado interactions are assessed when using a simplified aerosol scheme with the intent of introducing these feedbacks into numerical weather prediction in the future, 3) The occurrence of these interactions is investigated for other tornado outbreaks on the record to learn about their frequency and under what conditions they occur, and 4) Multi-scale simulations are performed from regional to tornado-resolving scales to assess the impact of smoke on the number of tornadoes formed and their EF intensity. Future steps will also be discussed.