Tornado Flattens Wisconsin Homes

Severe weather, including tornadoes, in April has been unusually active in the Midwest while almost absent in the Southeast, where it's usually busiest in spring.

Severe Displacement

The number of tornado reports in the U.S. so far in April — 185 — is pretty typical.

But it's where they've happened, and where they haven't, that's been a bit odd.

As the map below shows, this month's tornadoes have almost exclusively been a Midwest and Plains thing. They've clustered in areas with lower April probabilities based on history, according to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center. The map of April tornado reports looks more like a May or June map.

Meanwhile, they've been completely absent from areas typically hit in April, from the mid-South and lower Ohio Valley to the Tennessee Valley and Southeast.

(Further beef up your forecast with our detailed, hour-by-hour breakdown for the next 8 days – only available on our Premium Pro experience.)

The Oddities

In a typical April, you might guess states like Alabama, Arkansas or Mississippi would lead the nation's tornado tally.

This April, so far, it's Illinois, followed by Wisconsin.

What's plotted in the bar graph below are both reports of and actual confirmed tornadoes by the National Weather Service for the top five states so far in April. Only one of those top five states — Oklahoma — is in the South.

Particularly bizarre is the Badger State.

Twenty-five tornadoes have been confirmed so far this month in Wisconsin, according to the NWS. That's more than an average year (23), all in the span of less than a week from April 13-17. It's equal to an average April in Texas.

Three of those Wisconsin tornadoes were rated EF3, the first April EF3s in the state in 15 years and the state's first April with at least three F/EF3+ twisters since 1984.

On the other end of the spectrum, not a single tornado has happened in the first three weeks of April in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. In fact the only tornado in the Southeast U.S. this month, so far, was a brief EF0 in Miami-Dade County on April 7.

States with more tornado reports this month than those Southeast states include California (2), New York (2), Utah (2) and Vermont (1).

Why?

In order to generate rounds of severe thunderstorms in spring, you need basic ingredients like warm, humid air and a southward plunge of the jet stream pivoting out of the West to provide wind shear and an unstable air mass.

In April, that scenario most often happens in the South and Ohio Valley.

But this month, that jet plunge has usually happened farther north, shifting the severe threat as far north as the upper Midwest, and also contributing to record flooding in parts of the Great Lakes.

Instead, a dome of high pressure aloft over the Gulf has often nosed northward into at least parts of the Deep South, either keeping it drier and hotter, or keeping the more organized severe thunderstorms well to the north and northwest.

The first three weeks of April were the hottest on record in Atlanta, Louisville, Nashville and Raleigh, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. They have also been the driest on record in Augusta, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina.

So, while wildfires have scorched areas of the Southeast in recent days, at least the typical siege of severe weather hasn't happened yet this month.

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter), Threads and Facebook.