It’s been a particularly bad twister season this year—and not just for those living in “Tornado Alley.”

The preliminary count of twisters between January and March, when tornado season began ramping up, means 2023 will be one of the most active first quarters on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And it could end up being the worst ever seen.

This all has us wondering about tornado risks for homeowners across the country and how much climate change is affecting the frequency, severity, and locations of these unstoppable storms that remind us of how small we are. So we analyzed climate risk data from CoreLogic, a real estate data supplier, to figure out how much tornado damages are likely to cost homeowners each year, depending on where they live—and what sort of bills they could be facing in the future as tornadoes become more dangerous.

While tornadoes mostly affect the Eastern swath of the country, this year places not normally associated with tornado risk have been touched by them. A 140-mph tornado struck Delaware (measured as the widest on record for the state) on April 1, the same day an “outbreak” of tornadoes touched down in New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. That followed a tornado that hit Los Angeles on March 22 and where a set of “twin tornadoes” hit again on May 4.

For a homeowner living in an area where tornadoes are a possibility, this is a reminder that although the chance a tornado affects you is small, it can still happen. But the science on how a changing climate affects tornadoes is far from settled.

“There’s no agreement, and there’s good reason for that,” says Howard Bluestein, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma.

Bluestein says there are far too many factors to predict with accuracy the changes in tornado frequency or intensity, from wind shears to soil moisture.

“We don’t understand why some supercell storms produce tornadoes and others don’t,” he adds.

CoreLogic’s predictions, which rely on widely used greenhouse gas modeling, show that damage costs resulting from severe convective storms—the kind that causes tornadoes and also other damaging wind, rain, and hail—could rise by more than 10% by 2040 and more than 25% by 2050, depending on the location, and that’s without adjusting for whatever future inflation occurs.

One caveat: The possibility exists of observation bias, where the count of tornadoes might have increased in part because the tools we use to observe these storms have gotten better. In addition, as more homes go up and areas become more populated, damages are likely to become more widespread. That’s not because there are more tornadoes, necessarily, only that there are more homes in their way.

According to CoreLogic’s data, in a place like Tarrant County, TX, severe convective storms currently cause around $411 million in residential damage in any given year. That translates into a risk of about $690 per homeowner each year. That, in turn, is worked into insurance premiums.

But by 2040, CoreLogic expects those costs to rise by 10%, to about $436 million across the county, or about $729 per homeowner, using the most extreme model (RCP85, which is based on increasing fossil fuel use). By 2050, those costs could rise by almost 20%, to about $522 million, or about $872 per homeowner—and that’s before accounting for inflation or the effects of population growth.

That’s where the science hits homeowners’ wallets. As the risks increase, homeowners are likely to spend more on their insurance premiums.

We plotted CoreLogic’s data on a map, to show where in the country tornado damage costs are expected to increase, and by how much.

For each of the 2,610 counties where there’s enough past tornado data to make predictions about the future (about three-quarters of all counties), CoreLogic’s data shows the current estimated average annual cost to a homeowner from severe convective storms, as well as the amount that figure is expected to rise under the RCP85 scenario. You can explore the data using the map below.

Though predictions about the effects of climate change are still not an exact science, says Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the NOAA’s severe storms laboratory, improvements in home construction techniques can be used to help mitigate these risks.

“The bottom line is we aren’t completely sure what climate change will do,” he says. “But we know enough to know the bounds of what climate change might do.”

And that’s enough to prompt him to take measures in his own home, where Brooks recently had an in-residence tornado bunker installed.

“It’s a walk-in closet, with 6-inch concrete walls and a steel-reinforced door. FEMA has plans online for these,” he says. “The guy who poured the concrete said it was relatively simple, and when he was done, he asked if he could come over if there’s a bad storm.”

The tornado fortification doesn’t stop there, though.

“Historically, roofs have been nailed on, but really held in place by gravity,” Brooks says. “What happens in most home failures in a tornado is the roof gets lifted off. You have pressure on the walls, there’s no place for it to go, you get upward pressure, and the roof goes.”

But builders are now using hurricane clips to protect against severe weather events that threaten to tear roofs from buildings. These clips secure roof rafters to the walls with inexpensive metal fittings.

“The buzzword in the community is ‘continuous load path,’” Brooks says. “These can add an order of magnitude to the pressure the roof can take.”

Bolts that more securely hold walls to a structure’s foundation are another of the “relatively inexpensive things that can reduce the risk for this kind of damage,” Brooks adds.

The post Bracing for the Storm: Find Out How Much Your Own Tornado Risk Is Expected To Grow appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.