Harold Brooks
NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, OK
02 June 2009, 3:30 PM
National Weather Center, Room 1350
120 David L. Boren Blvd.
University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK
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Severe thunderstorms cause approximately $10 billion in damage and kill approximately 100 people per year in the United States. As such, they have large impacts on life and property in the country. Globally, severe thunderstorms have been observed on every continent except Antarctica.
In the last 25 years, individual tornadoes have killed 1300 in Bangladesh and 400 in the Soviet Union. The second costliest natural disaster in Australia was a hailstorm that struck Sydney and President Nelson Mandela escaped uninjured when a building he was in collapsed in a tornado.
Clearly, the impacts of current severe thunderstorms are large. As climate changes, it seems logical to consider whether those impacts are likely to change and, if so, how. To do this, we need to understand the current state of our understanding of severe thunderstorms and how we can estimate the global distribution. From that basis, a number of approaches can be used to estimate changes, including using our background knowledge and climate model estimates of changes in the environment. In this talk, I’ll describe the current state of the art, the challenges that limit what we can say, and possible approaches to addressing those challenges.
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