Climate Risk Assessment Framework for Tornadoes

Tornadoes are low-probability high-consequence hazards that are capable of causing significant damages to communities. Future projections of tornadic events are challenging to estimate since tornadoes usually form at scales far less than typical global climate model (GCM) resolutions. As a result, tornado projections are uncertain which can compromise the confidence in downstream risk management for business decision making. This study proposes an approach to estimate and quantify the uncertainty of future tornado risk and improves the representation of uncertainty by incorporating downscaling uncertainty as well as GCMs and internal variability uncertainties. We use our previously-developed climate risk assessment and benchmarking framework which facilitates estimation of climate risk projections for a range of hazards and includes rigorous benchmarking and validation mechanisms to increase confidence in outcomes. We quantify tornado risk using Tornado Weather Condition (TWC); a metric that assesses ingredients of tornadic events. We project TWC for 2030-2070 under RCP8.5 scenario using an ensemble of downscaled projections of relevant climate variables. We validate our outputs using historical observations and benchmark results from various climate projection sources. Our work contributes to future tornado risk studies by benchmarking different GCM sources and better representing uncertainty sources.