Projecting May Tornado Outbreak Patterns in a Warming Climate

Tornado outbreaks, involving multiple destructive tornadoes in close succession, result from interactions between large-scale atmospheric patterns and mesoscale dynamics. With a warming climate altering atmospheric behavior, the frequency and distribution of outbreak-favorable patterns may change, influencing future risks. Building on our recently introduced methodology for identifying tornado outbreak-favorable atmospheric patterns in a global climate model, we apply the method, for the first time, to future projections (2065–2100) across four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways using the MPI-ESM1-2-HR model. Focusing on May tornado outbreaks in the United States, we find that outbreak-supportive patterns are projected to increase in frequency and expand northward and eastward, beyond their historical geographic focus in the Great Plains and southeastern U.S. This application demonstrates how a dual-variable, threshold-based method can be applied to global climate model projections to investigate event-specific extremes, offering a pathway for assessing future risks of severe convective hazards under a warming climate.