The farther south you live, the longer your tornado season lasts. For safety, it’s time to stop focusing on spring as tornado season and the Great Plains as Tornado Alley. The high tornado count in 2025 has a lot to do with the weather in March, which broke records with 299 reported tornadoes — far exceeding the average of 80 for that month over the past three decades. The first use of the term “Tornado Alley” can be traced to 1952.
Tornado Alley: Where Twisters Form
The storm system is expected to move offshore by the end of the day on Monday (March 17), according to CNN. However, extremely critical fire-weather conditions are likely to persist into Tuesday afternoon (March 18), according to the NWS Storm Prediction Center. April and May also produced tornado outbreaks, but the preliminary count over most of this period, since the March 31-April 1 outbreak, has actually been close to the average, though things could still change. That’s well above the national average of around 660 tornadoes reported by that point over the past 15 years, and it’s similar to 2024 — the second-most active year over that same period. The U.S. has had more reported tornadoes than normal — over 960 as of May 22, according to the National Weather Service’s preliminary count. While not as familiar as Tornado Alley, the designation Dixie Alley generally refers to another part of the country that is likely to experience tornadoes — generally the upper Tennessee Valley and Lower Mississippi Valley.
- She has a Bachelor’s degree in English and Astrophysics from Agnes Scott college and served as an intern at Sky & Telescope magazine.
- However, those tornado days have been producing more tornadoes.
- If you are in a mobile home or trailer, leave immediately.
- Nola Taylor Tillman is a contributing writer for Live Science and Space.com.
Tornadoes are a worldwide phenomenon, touching down in every continent save Antarctica. OpinionA storm scientist explains what’s been driving deadly tornado outbreaks and how tornado season has been changing. Tornadoes are violently rotating columns of air that stretch between the ground and the base of storm clouds.
Remember that almost half of tornado-related injuries occur after the tornado has ended. Be careful when entering buildings that have been damaged. Wear sturdy shoes and appropriate clothes to avoid scrapes. Do not touched downed power lines or anything in contact with such lines.
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. A devastating, nearly mile-wide “wedge tornado” has killed at least 26 people and battered Mississippi with golf ball-size hail and winds up to 200 mph. Tornado Alley is a nickname given to a region stretching across several South Central states where destructive tornadoes are most likely to occur, according to AccuWeather. “More people live in the Mississippi and Tennessee valleys, and more of those families are in vulnerable buildings without basements like mobile homes.” Tornado Alley is really all of the U.S. east of the Rockies and west of the Appalachians for most of the year.
However, a relatively small percentage of Florida’s tornadoes are considered high intensity. They vary, depending on the criteria used — frequency, intensity, or events per unit area. If your television or radio announces a tornado watch, this means that conditions are favorable for a tornado to form. If a tornado warning is announced, it means a tornado has been sighted or indicated by radar. Moisture emitted by a single leaf provides clues to imminent thunderstorms and tornadoes. In the U.S., tornado season usually begins in early March when cold air from Canada clashes with warm, moist air from the Gulf.
How safe are you?
- Tornado detection and forecasting is rapidly improving and has saved thousands of lives over the past 50-plus years, but forecasts can save lives only if people are able to receive them.
- However, extremely critical fire-weather conditions are likely to persist into Tuesday afternoon (March 18), according to the NWS Storm Prediction Center.
- And 9 p.m., but again, they can occur at any time in the day or night.
- An EF0 tornado may damage trees but not buildings, with winds ranging up to 85 mph (137 km/h).
- Tornadoes can occur anywhere in the United States, as well as in other countries.
The normal seasonal cycle of tornadoes moves inland from near the Gulf Coast in winter to the upper Midwest and Great Plains by summer. Oklahoma, northwest Texas and the Texas panhandle are bracing for a day of extreme weather, including dangerous tornadoes, flooding and thunderstorms. On Friday (March 14) and Saturday, a particularly powerful storm system tore through many Central and Southern states, with 52 confirmed tornadoes whipping up expansive dust storms and wildfires. Nearly 1,100 flights were canceled during the two day period and 150 million people were affected by the extreme weather, AccuWeather reports. Meanwhile, winds topping 80 mph (129 km/h) were reported across the Southern Plains on Friday, with three people killed in car crashes attributed to dust storms in Texas. Many of the deaths have occurred outside Tornado Alley, with at least six fatalities reported in Mississippi and three reported in both Arkansas and Alabama.
Latest about tornadoes
Tornadoes in the Southeastern U.S. are more likely to strike overnight, when people are asleep and cannot quickly protect themselves, which makes these events dramatically more dangerous. The tornado that hit London, Kentucky, struck after 11 p.m. It may come as a surprise that the U.S. has actually seen a decrease in overall U.S. tornado activity over the past several decades, especially for intense tornadoes categorized as EF2 and above. However, those tornado days have been producing more tornadoes.
Tornado Facts: Causes, Formation & Safety
She has a Bachelor’s degree in English and Astrophysics from Agnes Scott college and served as an intern at Sky & Telescope magazine.
Tornadoes
Years with fewer tornadoes often have calm periods of a couple of weeks or longer when a sunny high-pressure system is parked over the central U.S. However, the U.S. didn’t really get one of those calm periods in spring 2025. I’m an atmospheric scientist who studies natural hazards. What stands out about 2025 so far isn’t just the number of tornadoes, but how Tornado Alley has encompassed just about everything east of the Rockies, and how tornado season is becoming all year. While the “Wizard of Oz” still conjures up images of Kansas as a tornado-prone area, that state is not the most highly impacted state when it comes to tornadoes. According to the National Climatic Data Center, tornado web server Texas reports the highest number of tornadoes of any state, although its very large land mass accounts for that status.
Kansas and Oklahoma are second and third respectively when it comes to the number of tornadoes reported, but those states report more tornadoes per land area than Texas. Tornado Alley is term that it is typically used to describe a wide swath of tornado-prone areas between the Rocky Mountains and Appalachian Mountains that frequently experience tornadoes. It is not an official weather term; it was primarily a phrase popularized by the media. A destructive tornado moved through the outskirts of Kansas City on Tuesday, injuring at least a dozen people and killing one. Between 1,300 and 1,450 tornadoes are predicted to occur across the U.S. in total in 2025, according to AccuWeather. Between 75 and 150 tornadoes have been forecast for March, 200 to 300 in April and 250 to 350 in May.
One of these tornadoes, which devastated the town of Diaz, reached estimated wind speeds of 190 mph (306 kilometers per hour), NWS reports. This shift in tornadoes to the east and earlier in the year is very similar to how scientists expect severe thunderstorms to change as the world warms. However, researchers don’t know whether the overall downward trend in tornadoes is driven by warming or will continue into the future.
‘More people are in harm’s way’: Tornadoes are shifting east of Tornado Alley, forecasters warn
Field campaigns studying how tornadoes form may help us better answer this question. “Our warming atmosphere can hold more moisture, unleashing intense rainfall rates that can trigger dangerous flash flooding,” he said. A string of deadly tornadoes, violent dust storms and fast-moving wildfires ripped across several midwestern and southern U.S. states over the weekend, leaving at least 42 people dead, according to CNN. That’s well to the east of traditional Tornado Alley, typically seen as stretching from Texas through Nebraska, and farther east than normal. April through May is still peak season for the Mississippi Valley, though it is usually on the eastern edge of activity rather than at the epicenter.
