the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 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.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this paper. While Copernicus Publications makes every effort to include appropriate place names, the final responsibility lies with the authors. Views expressed in the text are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.- Preprint
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Status: open (until 21 Jun 2026)
- CC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-1730', John M Peters, 13 May 2026 reply
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CC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-1730', Paul Markowski, 13 May 2026
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I would like to see a skew T diagram of the environment. The reader also isn’t told explicitly what the environmental LCL, SRH, or CAPE are (among other things about the environment that are calculated from a sounding or hodograph). From Fig. 5 (which shows the various contributions to STP) and eqn (1) (the eqn for STP), it looks like the MLLCL contributes approximately 0.6–0.7 to STP, which would imply an MLLCL of 1 km. Given this, how can there be so much condensational heating below 1 km? Is it because the storm has a wall cloud that extends much closer to the ground than the predicted cloud base height? I am skeptical that a supercell in a simulation with dx = 1 km would have such a wall cloud though (a substantial wall cloud is unlikely to be resolved in my experience). All of this condensation below the cloud base (at least the cloud base one can infer from Fig. 5) needs to be explained. I admit to being unfamiliar with WRF, but in a few places it’s mentioned that the thermodynamic budget isn’t reconciled. Would that not suggest a bug, and if the budget has known problems, can we trust the budgets? The claim of condensational heating in the 300-1000 m layer should raise eyebrows if the environmental LCL is indeed at roughly 1 km.It is also argued that aerosols enhance tornado likelihood by increasing STP. Why not also look at the simulated supercells themselves in order to judge tornado potential (e.g., max near-surface zeta as a proxy for tornado threat)? It would seem better to look at the rotational properties of the supercells themselves given that there’s more to tornado formation within a supercell than simply the environmental STP. Regarding the calculations of STP, I have trouble following the methodology described in section 2.4, but it seems to be saying that STP values were averaged within an area that is within a grid cell of 30 dBZ reflectivity. That’s awfully close to the storm, and not really in the region previous studies typically have evaluated storm environments. It’s unclear to me if this averaging region lies in the storm inflow.Citation: https://doi.org/
10.5194/egusphere-2026-1730-CC2
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This article attempts to associate aerosols with tornado potential in supercells. I have found numerous errors, inconsistencies, incorrectly cited articles, and misrepresentations of past research. My comments are listed below:
1) P2, L30: The authors state that research indicates that aerosols can invigorate microphysical heating. However, there are numerous articles that argue that aerosol invigoration of microphysical heating is unfeasible. For instance:
Igel and Van den Heever (2021): https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093804
Grabowski and Morrison (2020): https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-20-0012.1
Romps et al. (2023): https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL100409
Peters et al. (2023): https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL103314
2) P2, L30: The authors state that condensational heating is necessary for tornadogenesis. However, there is no literary basis this connection that I am aware of. The authors need to provide a citation.
3) P3, L85: A radar-observed velocity couplet does not necessarily indicate that there is near-ground rotation. This only shows rotation at the elevation of the radar beam.
4) P8, L 145: The method here for estimating storm motion (C) is outdated. The standard among the forecasting and research community is the method introduced by Bunkers (2000; https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0434(2000)015<0061:PSMUAN>2.0.CO;2), to be used when the storm motion is not known. However, the authors have a simulated storm, they should use the simulated storm motion.
5) Equations 6a-6e: This decomposition is not useful because it is not Galilean invariant (see Davies Jones 2002; https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(2003)059<3178:LANPOS>2.0.CO;2).
6) Eq. 6b is written incorrectly: This equation should contain squared first derivatives (du/dx)^2 + (dv/dy)^2 + (dw/dz)^2, not second derivatives. The way the equation is currently written, the units on the left-hand-side do not equal those on the right-hand-side.
7) P10, L215: These are the incorrect boundary conditions for the pressure decomposition. The authors use Dirichlet conditions (p’=0) on all boundaries. However, the lower boundary for dynamic pressure needs Neumann conditions (dp’/dz = 0), and the lower boundary for buoyancy pressure is (dp_b/dz = -rho B). This error invalidates all analysis using the pressure decomposition, especially near the ground. See (see Davies Jones 2002; https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(2003)059<3178:LANPOS>2.0.CO;2) and numerous other articles.
8) P11, L230: This statement about the model underestimating aerosol impacts is purely speculative. There is no citation or evidence to provide a basis for this statement.
9) Section 3.2: The authors should focus on the near-ground characteristics of the simulated storm (such as near-ground rotation), rather than STP, to assess aerosol impacts on tornadoes. Otherwise the conclusions are tenuous at best.
10) P14, L260: The relationship between low-level inflow, low-level mesocyclones, and tornadoes is poorly understood (see Peters et al. (2023); https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-22-0114.1). Hence, increases in inflow do not necessarily influence tornado potential.
11) P17, L295: The authors attribute differences in condensational heating to aerosol effects. However, there are a million different reasons why there could be differences in condensational heating between the simulations, ranging from stochastic differences in storm behavior to differences in meteorological characteristics within the storm environments. Hence, there is no causal relationship between aerosols and condensational heating demonstrated here.
12) P18, L300: Aerosol-driven enhancement in condensational heating is not “well-known.” In fact, it is a hotly debated topic with numerous papers suggesting that it is implausible. The authors have conveniently neglected to cite or discuss these papers, as I mentioned earlier.
13) P20, L310: Why are we even talking about condensational heating below 0.3 km? At these levels, parcels are likely to be subsaturated so condensational heating is a moot point.
General conclusions: The conclude that aerosols enhance low-level updraft buoyancy, which drives more inflow, increases the STP, and therefore enhances tornado potential. However, they have not at all demonstrated a causal relationship between aerosols and microphysical heating. The differences in storm behavior between the two simulations could be attributable to a multitude of other factors. This lack of causality is especially concerning given the large body of research (which is ignored in this paper) that has shown that substantial enhancement of condensational heating by aerosols is implausible. Hence, this conclusion is unlikely to be true. It is almost certain that meteorological factors other than those emphasized in this article are responsible for the differences seen between the two simulations.