CNN
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In a typical year, more than 1,000 tornadoes occur across the United States, causing billions of dollars in damage and killing scores of Americans.
Storms occur throughout the country throughout the year, but are most common in the spring and summer months in the Deep South, Great Plains, and parts of the Midwest.
Track your frequency and recent location on this page, which is updated daily.
The National Weather Service and the Storm Prediction Center record severe weather information as it occurs, including information regarding tornadoes. This map plots the number and location of preliminary reports of tornadoes over the past seven days.
March is the typical start of the spring tornado season, with April, May, and June at its peak. Based on averages from 1991 to 2020, May is typically the most active month, with 268 twisters per year.
Tornadoes are being reported more in some parts of the country than others, with clusters occurring in the nation’s storm-prone regions of the Midwest, Plains and South, according to a CNN analysis that counted tornadoes within a 45-kilometer hexagonal grid of the continental United States.
In addition to the property damage caused each year by destructive winds, storms also cause many deaths each year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that tracks severe weather events.
Since 1991, they have killed an average of nearly 70 people each year. This number had inflated somewhat by 2011, when 553 people were killed. More than 300 of them died in the outbreak in late April. This outbreak was one of the deadliest and most costly outbreaks ever recorded. In less than a month, the Joplin, Missouri tornado killed more than 150 people, making it the seventh deadliest tornado in U.S. history.
