Modeling the World’s Most Violent Thunderstorms

Abstract

Each year tornadoes are responsible for loss of life and property as they wreak destruction across large swaths of the United States. The storms that cause the most damaging tornadoes, supercell thunderstorms, have been the subject of numerical modeling since the dawn of the supercomputing age in the late 1970s. In 2020, models run on supercomputers can simulate individual thunderstorms with unprecedented realism where well-resolved multiple-vortex tornadoes form as the result of physical processes occurring within the model. Research conducted on the Frontera supercomputer includes identifying specific processes occurring in supercells that result in the most devastating tornadoes, those ranked EF4/5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. While such tornadoes account for a small fraction of observed tornadoes, they cause the bulk of the damage and fatalities, and only by increasing our knowledge of what discerns these rare but powerful storms from less damaging storms will better forecasts be possible.