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Illinois has long been known for Abraham Lincoln, Da Bears and the Blues Brothers. But this year, its calling card is tornadoes.
Illinois has seen at least 207 tornadoes so far this year, said Victor Gensini, Professor Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms at Northern Illinois University. That’s a new state annual record and more than three times the state’s current 20-year average, according to federal data.
“What an incredibly active year,” Gensini said.
Even more noteworthy is the preliminary number of tornado reports year-to-date – 241 – with 4.5 months to go. That number is likely to change, but it puts Illinois on pace to possibly break the all-time national state record for tornadoes. The current record, set by Texas in 2015 is either 241 or 245, depending on which database is used from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The “relentless” year started with a tornado on March 10 that produced a 6.6 inch hailstone set to be verified as a new state record and “it really never slowed down after that,” Gensini said. “It’s been an amazing year for me as a severe weather researcher.”
The 2026 data will remain preliminary until finalized by the National Weather Service in early 2027, but preliminary numbers are usually a good indicator of the final number, he said.
It won’t be the first time Illinois has surpassed Texas in tornadoes, according to NOAA data. Illinois has seen a higher number of tornadoes than Texas six times over the past 21 years. Per square mile, Gensini said Illinois often gets more tornadoes than Texas, which is five times larger.
Why did Illinois get so many tornadoes?
It’s been a particularly busy year for the region, including Missouri and Indiana, said Harold Brooks, research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. “This has been a spectacularly active period for that area,” Brooks told USA TODAY.
It’s hard to point to any one cause for the huge number of tornadoes this year, Gensini said. “I think most of it has just been kind of bad luck.”
“The ingredients that are required to produce these supercell storms have been very, very prevalent,” he said. “We have been kind of underneath the location of the jet stream on several occasions this year, and that jet stream, of course, is one of those really fundamental ingredients that allow storms to rotate.”
“We’ve also just had a lot of heat and humidity,” he said. Chicago suburbs were hitting 80 degrees on March 10, the same day the record hailstone fell, he said.
Gensini said he thinks the tornadoes this year also reflect a shifting trend in tornado activity that he and Brooks documented in a 2018 study. The study found an increase in tornado activity outside the area that had traditionally been known as “tornado alley.”
Over 20 years, the annual average number of reported tornadoes had increased significantly across states stretching from Illinois to Georgia, even taking into account improvements in reporting and technology, experts told USA TODAY. In Alabama and Kentucky between 2000 and 2020, the annual average of reported tornadoes more than doubled from the annual average of the prior 20-year period, according to a USA TODAY Network analysis of federal tornado data.
Tornado activity in Illinois has climbed in recent decades. The state’s annual average has grown from 37.8 in 2020 to 63.1 in 2025.
The “most remarkable thing” this year is the fact the state has seen a record number of tornadoes but very few tornado fatalities, Gensini said. “It’s impossible to measure the number of lives” saved this year by the National Weather Service, he said. Looking at the tornado numbers, “you’d never expect the fatalities to be as low as they are.”
He credits the “wonderful forecasts” by the Storm Prediction Center and the watches and warnings from the weather service offices covering Illinois. Through Aug. 12, he said, the five forecast offices serving Illinois had issued 463 tornado-warning events, more than all of the 19 forecast offices based in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska combined (428).
Dinah Voyles Pulver and Doyle Rice are national correspondents with USA TODAY, focused on weather and climate. Reach them at dpulver@usatoday.com and drice@usatoday.com. Ramon Padilla and Janet Loehrke are graphics journalists at USA TODAY. Reach them at rpadilla@usatoday.com and jloehrke@usatoday.com