# Trends in the extremes of environments associated with severe US thunderstorms

## TL;DR

This study analyzes long-term trends in extreme environmental conditions linked to severe US thunderstorms, revealing increasing risks in spring months and climate-related influences like El Niño and La Niña.

## Contribution

It applies extreme-value theory to identify significant trends in storm-related variables over decades, highlighting new climate change implications for severe weather risk.

## Key findings

- Significant increases in PROD maxima in April, May, August
- Rising CAPE extremes in April, May, June
- El Niño-Southern Oscillation influences storm extremes in February

## Abstract

Severe thunderstorms can have devastating impacts. Concurrently high values of convective available potential energy (CAPE) and storm relative helicity (SRH) are known to be conducive to severe weather, so high values of PROD=$\sqrt{\mathrm{CAPE}} \times$SRH have been used to indicate high risk of severe thunderstorms. We consider the extreme values of these three variables for a large area of the contiguous US over the period 1979-2015, and use extreme-value theory and a multiple testing procedure to show that there is a significant time trend in the extremes for PROD maxima in April, May and August, for CAPE maxima in April, May and June, and for maxima of SRH in April and May. These observed increases in CAPE are also relevant for rainfall extremes and are expected in a warmer climate, but have not previously been reported. Moreover, we show that the El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation explains variation in the extremes of PROD and SRH in February. Our results suggest that the risk from severe thunderstorms in April and May is increasing in parts of the US where it was already high, and that the risk from storms in February tends to be higher over the main part of the region during La Ni\~na years. Our results differ from those obtained in earlier studies using extreme-value techniques to analyze a quantity similar to PROD.