Shifting hail hazard under global warming and effects on crop hail risk

Abstract

Hailstorms cause damage across the globe and endanger crops, but their changes in a warming climate are not well quantified. Here we apply three hail proxies to an ensemble of global model projections to show divergent changes in hail-prone condition frequency worldwide. Changes depend on whether the proxy allows instability increases to be offset by temperature or moisture increases. Uncertainty on hail projections remains high, especially in the tropics. In projections with 2 °C and 3 °C of mean global warming, ensemble-mean hail-prone conditions shifted polewards, with decreases in hail hazard in the mid-latitudes and increases in colder regions. Across 26 crop types with fixed exposure and vulnerability, hail risk was generally projected to increase for winter crops such as wheat and decrease for summer crops such as maize. Poleward shifts in hail hazard may attenuate yield increases from similar shifts in crop regions under climate change. How hailstorms change with warming is not well understood. Here the authors use global projections with different hail proxies to show that hail-prone conditions shift polewards under warming, also shifting crop risk related to hail hazards.