| 04 May 2026
Impacts of aerosols on the tornado potential: A case study in Yangtze River Delta, China
Abstract. Extensive observational and modeling studies have demonstrated that aerosols can modify extreme rainfall and convective storms. Their impacts on the genesis and development of tornadoes remain largely unexplored. By incorporating data assimilation into WRF-Chem simulations, we successfully simulate the whole life cycle of a supercell tornado and demonstrate the roles of anthropogenic aerosols. It is found that aerosols can enhance tornado potential, quantified here by the Significant Tornado Parameter, and affect storm motion, precipitation evolution, and cold-pool structure chiefly through two mechanisms. First, aerosols enhance condensational heating within the 0.3–1 km layer. Second, aerosols reduce near-surface evaporative cooling within the low-level updraft core by shifting it away from regions of strong rain evaporation. Together, these thermodynamic effects increase heating and thermal buoyancy, accelerating the low-level updraft. The aerosol-caused strengthening of the updraft enhances low-level convergence and deepens storm-relative inflow, leading to increased ingestion of streamwise vorticity in the 0–1 km layer, which dominates the enhancement of the tornado potential. This study gains new insights into the thermodynamic and dynamical pathways through which aerosols can influence extreme weather.
Competing interests: One of the authors, Zhanqing Li, is a member of the editorial board of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.
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