Abstract
Alongside topographic forcing, deep moist convection makes a significant contribution to the global budget of upward momentum transport by gravity waves. Long‐lived thunderstorms with rotating updrafts, known as supercells, produce strong, deep, and highly variable updrafts over many hours. This study uses an idealized modeling framework in Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) to simulate supercells and their associated gravity waves up to 35 km altitude. The background wind profiles are based on a combination of observed soundings in the troposphere and reanalysis in the stratosphere, so that modification and filtering of the waves in the stratosphere is also reproduced. In these simulations the supercell is caused to end and the simulations continue until most of the wave energy has dissipated. Thus, upward momentum transport can be computed over the entire life cycle of the storm and its associated waves, providing a more complete picture of the total impact of the event. The efficiencies of the emission of gravity wave energy (normalized by latent‐heat release) and horizontal momentum (normalized by upward momentum flux in the convection) are compared for supercells and transient thunderstorms in both similar and more weakly sheared tropospheric environments. Upward transport of energy appears to be modulated by the degree of tropospheric wind shear, but upward transport of zonal and meridional momentum also varies depending on the storm duration and intensity. In similar environments, the more intense and more transient storms inject energy and momentum into the stratosphere with higher efficiency. The results support previous findings that the net upward transmission of momentum and energy produced by moist convection can depend on storm morphology.