The U.S. has had a busy and destructive tornado season so far, especially in the middle of the country.

“We have had quite an active season altogether, when we're looking at the United States as a whole,” said Jana Houser, an associate professor in the atmospheric sciences program at The Ohio State University.

The national tornado count is just above where it was at this time last year, which was a particularly high tornado year overall. Since 2010, 2025 is the second-most active year up to this time, with 1,297 tornadoes reported as of the end of June.

The tornadoes that have hit have also been strong and damaging, said Dan Chavas, a professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University.

“It's been a pretty violent year,” Chavas said. “We've had quite a number of tornado outbreaks that have resulted in tornadoes that have caused pretty widespread damage and quite a lot of deaths across the country.”

Tornadoes have killed 68 people in the U.S. in 2025, with the majority of those deaths in Kentucky and Missouri.

“The 68 tornado fatalities that we've seen so far this year is fairly close to what we see average for an entire year,” said Evan Bentley, a meteorologist with the national Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. “So the fact that we are already there six months into the year would suggest that we could be on our way to an above normal year for tornado fatalities in the country.”

Missouri has also already broken its annual record for tornado reports at 117, said State Climatologist Zack Leasor. That includes the May 16 tornado that hit St. Louis, killing five people and causing more than $1 billion in estimated damage.

“It is somewhat alarming that we've already had so many tornadoes this year, but we do still have half of a year to go, and on average, can see tornadoes even out of our regular season,” Leasor said. “So this record number could unfortunately grow with more severe weather events.

In recent decades, the way tornadoes affect the U.S. has been changing. Scientists say some of those new patterns are likely related to climate change.

Tornadoes are becoming more active further east, out of what was traditionally known as tornado alley. That has been on display this year, as Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Tennessee have seen heavy tornado activity.

“We typically think of tornadoes as happening in what's often called the tornado alley of the Great Plains: Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas,” Chavas said. “They have been seeing fewer tornadoes over time, over the last few decades, and we've been seeing more of them farther east.”

Daniel Wheaton

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The Midwest Newsroom

That could be because climate change is bringing drier, hotter years to parts of the central U.S., Houser said.

“If you don't have moisture around, you can't get thunderstorms, right?” Houser said. “So we are hypothesizing that the link to the tornado counts going down there is related to drier years.”

There has also been a shift in when tornadoes are forming, according to the scientists. They’re now happening more often in colder months, especially in southeastern states.

“We're talking January, February, so sort of a shift in the season towards earlier months,” Chavas said. “But I'd also even describe it as a little bit of a spreading out more through the year.”

In the southeastern U.S., that is tied to a warming Gulf of Mexico, said Houser.

“The Gulf of Mexico has more heat,” Houser said. “It's hanging onto its heat longer into the colder season. So we actually have more energy available from the warm waters of the Gulf now than we did traditionally in history, that is a direct function of climate change.”

Humans have gotten a lot better at measuring and documenting tornadoes in recent decades, thanks to doppler technology and more eyewitnesses with cell phone cameras. That has led to more robust reports, said Bentley with the national Storm Prediction Center.

“Twenty to 30 years ago, and especially much farther back, there were a lot of tornadoes that occurred but were never documented,” Bentley said. “Now we're documenting most of them, so we do end up with a lot of the more active years in more recent times.”

But there is still a lot that scientists are trying to understand about exactly how and why tornadoes form, and how climate change might affect those processes.

“The links are not very well understood, mainly because there's a bunch of ingredients you're throwing into the tornado stew,” Chavas said.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public Radio

Part of the challenge is that tornadoes are relatively small and short-lived compared to other weather systems, Chavas said. That makes them hard to model.

That also makes it hard to understand how climate change affects them, Houser said. To study long-term climate change, scientists can look at things like tree rings and deep ocean sediments.

“Tornadoes are very small-scale, localized events, so they don't really leave behind the same kind of historical markers that the large-scale climate indicators provide to us,” Houser said.

But there does seem to be a bright side so far. The number of tornadoes and their severity does not seem to be changing in the U.S. as a whole, Houser said.

“The sense that tornadoes are getting worse or that they're getting more frequent is very much a short term memory loss kind of a scenario, coupled with the fact that media is in your face about it,” Houser said. “We have streaming, we have cell phones to record all of these things, we are visually seeing any tornado that happens anywhere.”

The U.S. is, however, seeing an increase in billion dollar disasters. And as humans build in bigger spaces, Houser said tornadoes are more likely to destroy things. That means it’s important for people to be prepared for tornadoes across the country.

“We need to communicate to the general public that they need to be ready for changing weather patterns,” Houser said. “They need to be prepared for hazardous events and events that they might not be used to seeing.”

This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.