Every year, the US sees around 1,200 tornadoes tear across its landscape – but lately, things have felt different. Tornadoes are striking earlier, appearing in unusual places and clustering together with alarming intensity. Now, in early April 2025, the pattern is continuing – and escalating.
In just the past 48 hours, 31 tornadoes have been reported across the US. A large and destructive tornado tore through Lake City, a small town about an hour northwest of Memphis, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a rare tornado emergency – its highest-level alert.
“We have reports of storm and tornado damage from around the state,” Arkansas Governor Sara Huckabee Sanders said in a post on X late on Wednesday night. “We have emergency personnel on the ground to help anyone who has been injured, but these storms aren’t finished yet.”
Dramatic videos posted to social media show the twister churning across the landscape, sending debris flying and flattening buildings. The Arkansas Division of Emergency Management has confirmed that at least four people were injured, but, remarkably, no fatalities have been reported so far.
A state of emergency has been declared in the state.
We have reports of storm and tornado damage from around the state. We have emergency personnel on the ground to help anyone who has been injured, but these storms aren’t finished yet.
Stay informed and most importantly stay safe! https://t.co/eKld2KIr6E
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) April 3, 2025
And the danger isn’t over. As of early Thursday morning, a tornado watch is in effect for millions of people across Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, including major cities like Nashville and Tupelo.
So what’s going on?
Twister science is messy – and changing
To understand what’s behind this ongoing uptick, it helps to know how tornadoes actually form. According to Prof Jana Houser, a tornado expert at The Ohio State University, you need two main ingredients:
Warm, moist air rising into colder air above
Winds moving at different speeds and directions with height — what meteorologists call vertical wind shear
“That upward motion then takes the rotation that's happening at the ground and basically pulls it together and sucks it up, intensifying in the process and forming a tornado,” Houser told BBC Science Focus.
But while the ingredients may sound simple on paper, the actual process is incredibly complex.
The consequence of the complex processes responsible for forming tornadoes is that predicting where they’ll crop up and why is, well, tricky.
And that’s part of the problem. We’re seeing more volatile tornado behaviour, but scientists are still working to understand exactly why.
What does this mean for people living in tornado-prone areas?
When tornadoes hit, they wreak havoc on communities, leaving behind a trail of destruction. Predicting where they’ll crop and providing people with early warnings is critical to minimise their impacts.
Thankfully, forecasters are getting better at this. Weather experts are now able to predict when the conditions for tornado formation will be ideal, and as soon as one is sighted or picked up on radar a warning can be sent immediately.
According to the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory, we could someday have models capable of predicting where individual tornadoes will arise too, though this remains some way off.
More worryingly, this shift appears to be part of a longer-term pattern. As our planet warms in response to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, experts are anticipating tornado hotspots to geographically shift in coming years.
Historically, the area centring around states like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska – known as ‘Tornado Alley’ – is where the most dramatic activity takes place. As these parts dry out due to climate change, however, larger numbers of twisters are forming in eastern regions.
This raises a serious problem: unlike the largely unpopulated plains found in Tornado Alley, the potential new hotspots encroach on more densely populated areas with greater infrastructure that could be destroyed.
Map of tornado alley highlighted in orange.
Tornado Alley in the US is historically where tornadoes most frequently occur. However, as climatic conditions change, their propensity to form in other regions is set to rise. - Getty
As well as this, tornado clustering – where more occur in a short space of time – might become more common. According to a 2019 study, while just 11 per cent of tornadoes between 1950 and 1970 occurred on days where there were 20 or more tornadoes, since 2000 that number has crept up to 29 per cent.
“We’re not necessarily expecting the number of tornadoes per year to change, but they’ll become more concentrated on particularly high impact days,” Houser said.
This only increases the need for effective forecasting, since people may need to find shelter from multiple twisters in quick succession. Usually, a tornado lasts for a matter of minutes, but if, say, tens of them come at once, those people trapped in their path will require refuge for days.
After the 2024 tornado season – which was the second worst on record – 2025 is off to an ominous start. According to the National Weather Service, peak tornado season doesn’t kick off until May and typically lasts until June or July (depending on location).
In other words, there could be a lot more tornadoes yet to come.
About our expert
Jana Houser is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the Ohio State University. She specialises in radar analysis of tornadoes and the supercell thunderstorms that commonly produce them by using state-of-the-art mobile radar observations.
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