Severe Convective Wind Environments and Future Projected Changes in Australia

Abstract

Thunderstorms can produce severe convective winds (SCWs) that damage buildings and other infrastructure such as electricity transmission towers. Understanding the climatology of SCWs is therefore important for planning and risk management. An archive of observed SCWs is used to examine a diverse set of diagnostics for indicating SCW environments based on reanalysis data. These diagnostics are then applied to climate model data to examine projections of future climate change for Australia. A diagnostic based on logistic regression is found to provide a better representation of observed SCW occurrences than other diagnostics. Projections for the future based on that diagnostic indicate increas..