Supercell thunderstorms, while rare, occur most frequently in the Great Plains region of the central United States, and are often responsible for extreme severe weather, including the majority of violent tornadoes and large hail, driving a significant portion of life and property loss. Given these societal implications, the impacts of climate change and a warming climate on supercell thunderstorms, their environment, and therefore severe weather production is the subject of much ongoing research. Understanding changes in geographic location and hazard risk will help both potential mitigation and societal preparedness for new severe weather regimes. This study bridges the long-term climate scale and shorter-term storm-scale through exploration of how a warmer, moister climate influences supercell behavior, characteristics, and potential severe weather production.First, a convective-allowing dynamically downscaled Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulation of a modern and future climate under the RCP 8.5 scenario is leveraged to identify changes in supercell environments and characteristics. Supercell thunderstorms were identified and tracked through each 13-year WRF integration, finding a net increase in supercell frequency and with a shift in seasonality towards early warm season. Regional three-dimensional grids of supercell-relative environments were also collected each hour throughout each supercell’s lifetime, followed by analysis of the differences between the modern and future environments. The future near-supercell environment showed an expected net increase in the magnitude and vertical distribution of convective available potential energy (CAPE) and convective inhibition (CIN), along with unexpected changes in the near-storm kinematics and wind fields. To better understand the storm-scale impact of these conflicting factors on supercell morphology and severe weather, the near-storm WRF environments were then used as background environments for an ensemble of fine-scale (250 m horizontal grid spacing) idealized simulations using the Bryan Cloud Model (CM1) across a range of supercell intensities. Future supercells were found to be slightly shorter lived and stronger in intensity but also less efficient at converting their more unstable environment into substantial strengthening. These fine scale simulations showed that while notable changes in supercell environments are expected, the storm scale impact does not necessarily translate to proportional changes in supercell behavior or characteristics.
