Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Geophysical Research Letters
Thunderstorms, produced when air rises through the depth of the troposphere, are notoriously difficult to represent in global climate models. Whether air parcels have the energy to rise or not does not depend solely on their characteristics, notably their “Convective Available Potential Energy” (CAPE). It is relative to the state of the environment around them. Specifically, the intensity that they reach, which translates into the potential to produce hail, lightning or damaging winds, depends on how much surrounding air is “entrained” from the sides as the air rises.
Peters et al. [2026] propose a new formulation for CAPE, that they call ECAPE for Entraining CAPE, which incorporates the effect of entrainment from first principles. To verify their theory, they first show that it predicts the geographical distribution of thunderstorms hotspots, such as the U.S. Great Plains, the Pampas of South America, and the African Sahel. They then use it to explain why thunderstorms are more intense over land than over oceans: because of a higher lifting condensation level (LCL) over land, that is, a higher bar that rising air has to reach before it can rise all the way to the top. In addition to solving this longstanding issue, the very fine resolution of the analysis (100m, 1hr) provides an invaluable benchmark for the current generation of kilometer-scale global models being developed.
Citation: Peters, J. M., Chavas, D. R., Su, C.-Y., Murillo, E. M., & Mullendore, G. L. (2026). A unified theory for the global thunderstorm distribution and land–sea contrast. Geophysical Research Letters, 53, e2025GL120252. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL120252
—Alessandra Giannini, Editor, Geophysical Research Letters