Simulated Changes in Storm Morphology Associated with a Sea-Breeze Airmass

This dataset contains all of the necessary namelists, input_sounding files (initial conditions) and code modifications to run the simulations that are presented in the paper Simulated Changes in Storm Morphology Associated with a Sea-Breeze Airmass. 

Below is the abstract for this paper:

The central east coast of Australia is frequently impacted by large hail and damaging winds associated with severe convective storms, with individual events recording damages exceeding AU$1 billion. These storms present a significant challenge for forecasting due to their development in seemingly marginal environments. They have often been observed to intensify upon approaching the coast, with case studies and climatological analysis indicating that interactions with the sea breeze are key to this process. The relative importance of the additional lifting and vorticity along the sea-breeze front compared to the change to a cooler, moister airmass with stronger low-level shear behind the front has yet to be investigated. Here, the role of the sea-breeze airmass is isolated using idealized numerical simulations of storms developing in a horizontally homogeneous environment. The base-state substitution (BSS) modeling technique is utilized to introduce the sea-breeze airmass following initial storm development. Compared to a simulation without BSS, the storm is longer lived and more intense, ultimately developing into a supercell. Separately simulating the changes in the thermodynamic and wind fields reveals that the enhanced storm longevity and intensity are primarily due to the latter. The change in the low-level environmental winds slows gust front propagation allowing the storm to continue to ingest warm, potentially buoyant environmental air. At the same time, increased low-level shear promotes the development of persistent updraft rotation causing the storm to transition from a multicell to a supercell.