Committee on Severe Local Storms

The Committee on severe local storms promotes AMS activities and represents the segment of the AMS research community engaged in understanding the structure and predicting the behavior of hazardous deep convective weather phenomena. This primarily includes analyzing, predicting, and understanding the structure and dynamics of severe thunderstorms, either as isolated cells or organized clusters, and associated hazards including tornadoes, damaging winds, large hail, lightning, and flash floods. This also includes the hazard information communication process, climatology of hazards and storm environments, and classification of hazard severity (e.g. enhanced Fujita scale for tornado intensity). We oversee a specialty conference every two years, promote outreach and community engagement activities, and review additions and changes to the Glossary of Meteorology along with updating AMS statements related to severe storms.

We welcome comments and suggestions from our community, so don't hesitate to contact us!


The AMS Committee on Severe Local Storms, a part of the Scientific and Technological Activities Commission (STAC), is soliciting proposals for a team of two individuals to organize the 32nd Conference on Severe Local Storms to be held in 2026! For those interested, please see the linked announcement.  The deadline for proposals is May 15, 2024!


On behalf of SLS Conference Co-Chairs John Allen and Casey Davenport, we are happy to announce that the 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms will be held 21-25 October 2024 in Virginia Beach, VA.  Hope to see you there!

Information on the call for abstracts to the 31st Severe Local Storms Conference is available here.