While this year's tornado season hasn't gotten off to the same explosive start as 2025, its effects have still been devastating.
In early March, a powerful outbreak swept across the central US over just a few days, spawning at least 18 twisters across states from Michigan to Oklahoma.
The storms killed eight people, destroyed homes and, at their peak, produced possibly one of the most violent tornadoes the country has seen since 2013 – with winds exceeding 200mph.
That Michigan was among the worst-hit only underscored how far the threat has spread: the state typically sees just 15 tornadoes in an entire year.
The storms were fuelled by unusually warm air for early March, combined with a surge of energy from a shifting jet stream.
And with the peak of tornado season still to come, residents across the country can expect hundreds more. For many, this dread is likely beginning to feel like an annual occurrence, with tornadoes striking earlier, appearing in unusual places and clustering together with alarming intensity.
What scientists know about tornadoes has never been more detailed, and yet predicting where the next one will strike remains as hard as ever. Now a warming climate is rewriting the rules altogether.
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.
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 and 2025 tornado seasons – which were some of the worst and most destructive on record – 2026 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’s still plenty more to come.
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