Tornado map of the United States

Every tornado recorded in the lower 48 states since 1950, 80,132 county track segments, each drawn from where it touched down to where it lifted and coloured by its rating. The violent ones glow brightest. Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley need no labels.

Every U.S. tornado track since 1950, glowing lines coloured by rating, densest across the southern Plains and the Deep South. — EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated
Labelled dots are famous tornadoes; follow one to its path map and the National Weather Service’s account. About one record in four, mostly 1996–2006, has no end point and appears as a short dot.

Zoom into your area

Type an address to see every tornado path within 25 miles on a live map, measured to the path, or open a state: Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi.

Where tornadoes begin

The same record as a density map: 80,060 tornadoes plotted only where each one started, counted in quarter-degree squares (about 17 by 14 miles in the Midwest). Brighter cells mean more tornadoes have begun there over seventy-six years.

Density of tornado begin-points since 1950. Gridlines mark every 5° of latitude and longitude. Named markers: Beecher 1953 · Plainfield 1990 · Xenia 1974 · Enderlin 2025 · Greensburg 2007 · Andover 1991 · Joplin 2011 · Mayfield 2021 · Moore 2013 · Wichita Falls 1979 · Lubbock 1970 · Tuscaloosa 2011 · Rolling Fork 2023 · Beauregard 2019 · Waco 1953 · Kissimmee 1998.

Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley

The map shows two distinct density peaks. The first runs north–south through the central plains: Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, Kansas, into Nebraska and South Dakota. This is the corridor commonly called Tornado Alley. The peak quarter-degree cell on the map sits near Oklahoma City — about 77 tornadoes since 1950 in roughly 250 square miles, more than one a year on average in a single small box.

The second peak sits to the southeast, across Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia. This is Dixie Alley. The total count is lower than the central plains, but the tornadoes there are disproportionately deadly: trees and forest cover obscure the funnel, mobile-home concentration is higher, the season runs into months when overnight tornadoes are common, and the population density across many of the affected counties is high. The April 27, 2011 outbreak — Tuscaloosa, Hackleburg–Phil Campbell, Smithville, Rainsville — is the modern reference event for what Dixie Alley can do in a single afternoon.

Why the central United States

The geography of severe weather in the United States is a function of where warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico runs into cold, dry air from the Rocky Mountains and Canada. The mixing line moves north through the spring as the continent warms, which is why the peak month for plains tornadoes is May. The Gulf-source moisture stays available later in the season further south, which is why Dixie Alley keeps producing into November and the cool-season tornadoes that hit Mississippi and Alabama happen on the same days that frontal systems sweep across the country.

Florida shows up clearly on the map too — a dense corridor along the peninsula, especially the southwest coast. Most of those are EF0 or EF1 tornadoes, often spun up by sea breeze convergence or hurricane outer bands. They rarely make headlines, but they happen so often that the cell counts rival central Oklahoma in places. Lethality is far lower because the winds are weaker and the structures they hit are more often tornado-resilient than mobile-home-heavy plains construction.

What the map does not show

The density map shows where tornadoes begin, not where they travel. The 2011 Tuscaloosa–Birmingham EF4 began near Greene County, Alabama and ended 81 miles later in Jefferson County; only its start point lands in a cell. That is why the track map at the top of this page exists: long-track tornadoes are undersold by any begin-point count, and drawn as paths they are the brightest lines on it.

The density map is also a count map, not a strength or impact map. Each Florida EF0 weighs the same as the Joplin EF5. The relationship between tornado density and tornado lethality is not linear: the deadliest single tornado on this map (Joplin, 161 deaths) sits in a cell that includes about a dozen total tornadoes since 1950. The strongest cell on the map (central Oklahoma) has had three EF5s in the database era but also dozens of weak tornadoes that did no damage.

The 0.25° grid is coarse on purpose. At finer resolutions the map degrades into noise: many cells contain a single tornado from sixty years ago. At coarser resolutions, the central plains corridor looks like one undifferentiated red blob. A quarter-degree square at these latitudes is roughly the area of a typical NWS forecast county, which lines up with how the underlying narrative-writing actually happens.

The data behind the map

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, 1950 through June 2026. Begin-point latitude and longitude come from the National Weather Service forecast office that surveyed the event. Pre-1996 records are sparser — many older entries lack lat/lng entirely and are not on this map. About 1,200 records in the database have a begin-point of (0, 0), placeholder coordinates for events whose location was never resolved; those are excluded. The map covers the lower 48; Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico are not plotted (Alaska records no tornadoes in the database, Hawaii records 42, mostly waterspouts).

For tornadoes near you specifically, the address-stack search at tornadolookup.com/lookup draws every tornado path within 25 miles of any U.S. address and measures how close each one came. The state and county pages — for example, Oklahoma or Tuscaloosa County, Alabama — collect the prose narratives the NWS office wrote for each event in their forecast area.

All states → · All recent tornadoes → · EF5 & F5 tornadoes → · Deadliest tornadoes → · Widest tornadoes → · Longest tracks →