About TornadoRiskCheck
Why this exists
"How likely is a tornado where I live" searches mostly turn up either a contractor's storm-shelter sales page or a hazard map with no dollar figure attached, and almost none of them ask the question that actually decides whether a shelter is worth it: has this county ever recorded a VIOLENT tornado, not just a frequent one. TornadoRiskCheck reports NOAA's own county-level tornado history next to what a shelter and the state rebate programs that fund part of it actually cost.
What goes into the number
Every county's track count, EF-scale breakdown, and casualty totals come from NOAA's Storm Prediction Center "actual tornadoes" database, 1950 through 2025, joined to Census Gazetteer and population data on county FIPS code. Storm-shelter cost figures are sourced from Angi's own published cost guide; state safe-room rebate terms come from each program's own published rules. All three are documented in the methodology guide.
A historical record, honestly labeled
A county's tornado history describes what NOAA has recorded there since 1950, not a prediction for any one address or any one year - and pre-radar-era records are documented by NOAA as undercounting weaker tornadoes in sparsely-instrumented areas. This site says so on every page and never claims to predict whether or when a tornado will strike a specific property.
Who runs this
TornadoRiskCheck is an independently run site. It is not affiliated with NOAA, FEMA, Angi, or any storm-shelter contractor or insurer. Where a page includes a sponsored link, that is disclosed on the page itself and in the privacy policy.
Written by
Each county page is generated by AI software from the cited NOAA Storm Prediction Center data and the published storm-shelter and rebate-program figures - no journalist or editor writes or reviews a page before it publishes. The tornado and cost figures themselves come from NOAA and the cited cost guides, not from AI; the AI only assembles the sentences around them.