The response of tropopause-overshooting convection over North America to climate change

Recent field campaigns, observational studies, and modeling work have demonstrated that extratropical tropopause-overshooting convection has a substantial and previously underestimated impact on stratospheric water vapor concentrations. This necessitates improved understanding of how tropopause-overshooting convection will respond to a warming climate. A growing body of research indicates that environments conducive to severe thunderstorms will occur more often and be increasingly unstable in the future, but no study has examined how this may be related to increased overshooting. To rectify this, this study leverages an existing pseudo–global warming (PGW) experiment to evaluate potential future changes in tropopause-overshooting convection over North America. We examine two 10-yr simulations consisting of 1) a retrospective period (2003–12) forced by ERA-Interim initial and boundary conditions (the control simulation) and 2) the same retrospective period with CMIP5 ensemble-mean high-end emission scenario climate changes added to the initial and boundary conditions (the PGW simulation). Tropopause-overshooting convection in the control simulation is validated against observed overshoots from both ground-based radar observations in the United States and GOES observations over North America. The model is shown to effectively simulate the observed regional distribution, annual cycle, and diurnal cycle of tropopause-overshooting convection. In the PGW simulation, tropopause-overshooting convection is found to increase more than 250% across the model domain, and the projected seasonal period of frequent tropopause-overshooting convection is shown to extend into late summer. Additionally, tropopause-overshooting convection with extreme tropopause-relative heights (>4 km) is more frequent in a warmed climate scenario.