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Climate Change Impacts on Severe Convective Storms
Research to help decision-makers understand current and projected future changes to thunderstorms and their impacts
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Research Project
Challenge
Climate change is affecting severe storms and their dangerous and costly impacts, including heavy rain, hail and extreme winds. However, the details of the expected changes remain difficult to quantify. This project helps to reduce uncertainty and provide decisionrelevant information to quantify risks and inform adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Solution
The project uses a variety of methods to quantify risks and project changes across different scales. At the regional scale, dynamical downscaling is used to simulate the effects of global warming on specific hazards, such as hail. At a global scale, the project uses statistical relationships between large-scale atmospheric conditions and local hazard occurrences to project potential changes.
Target customers / endusers
• insurers and re-insurers
• decision-makers in government
• emergency management services.
Progress
• received industry support from two insurance-sector companies
• research outputs in active use in the insurance sector
• organised 2025 Science- Industry Workshop on Severe Convective Storms.
Basic research
Sustainable transition
Climate & Clean Energy
The project uses cuttingedge climate science, such as dynamical downscaling and statistical analysis of global climate models, to examine how thunderstorms are affected by global warming now and for the future.
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