Severe convective storms (SCS) are among the most impactful weather phenomena, producing hazards such as hail, extreme precipitation, damaging winds, tornadoes, and lightning. Understanding them requires bridging scales that are usually studied separately: hydrometeor growth and updraft dynamics operate on scales of metres and minutes, storm organisation and longevity on the mesoscale, and the environments that permit severe convection are set by synoptic and large-scale circulation. The resulting hazard climatologies, and how they shift under a warming climate, emerge from the interaction of all of these.
Progress on the central questions — why some storms produce severe hazards and others do not, how far ahead this is predictable, and how hazard frequency and intensity will change — depends on work that connects these scales rather than treating them in isolation. This session provides a venue for that exchange across the SCS community, from process studies to global assessments and societal impacts.
This session welcomes contributions on:
- dynamical and microphysical processes governing storm severity and hazard production, including updraft dynamics, storm development, organisation, evolution and intensity
- pre-storm environments, convective parameters, and the large-scale drivers of severe convection
- storm-scale and environmental predictability, nowcasting and forecasting, and their verification
- hazard, storm, and environmental climatologies and trends, including regional climatologies and under-observed regions
- changes in storm dynamics, hazard evolution, and storm frequency and intensity under climate change
- societal impacts of severe convective storms, including compound and consecutive events
- aerosol–cloud interactions and their influence on storm microphysics and hazard severity
We welcome studies using high-resolution numerical modelling, machine learning, statistical analysis, in-situ observations and field campaigns, remote sensing, crowd-sourced data, reanalyses, and global climate models. Contributions from operational services and the private sector are explicitly welcome.