Illinois is leading the country in tornadoes this year and many of them have touched down in the state’s central region.
Through a combination of fluctuating temperatures and a lot of precipitation, the National Weather Service [NWS] reports Illinois has seen 172 confirmed tornadoes this severe weather season. That's an all-time record for the state.
Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford said that is also at least twice the number of any other state.
“The ingredients I mentioned were just really having enough instability in the atmosphere, which is heat, humidity, especially that coming in from the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “The second one is the right dynamics, the right air movement, both here at the surface and up in the upper atmosphere.”
Ford said that is why the state saw 70 tornadoes in April alone, because the ingredients were already at play. It was the warmest April in recorded history of the state.
“We took a break in May, but then in June, now we’ve been back on it where we’ve had the right conditions, the larger environment, as well as the right conditions here in Illinois to make it so that it’s a record-breaking active severe weather year,” said Ford.
Although, why is Illinois a tornado favorite this year instead of Missouri, Indiana or Wisconsin? Ford said it is just bad luck.
The hotspot in the hot state
As for Central Illinois by itself, it is the hotspot for the already popular state for tornadoes. NWS confirmed 96 tornadoes have struck the region this year since February.
Notably, McLean County faced especially destructive weather, including tornadoes and thunderstorms, on April 15 and again in mid-June.
Ford said the NWS shows 135 tornado reports for the region. One confirmed tornado can receive multiple reports.
Ford said this again comes from an unstable weather pattern in the spring season.
“Already, this June is a top five wettest, at least top 10 wettest on record in Peoria, not even counting the precipitation we got [last week] and given the outlooks, it looks like we’re going to continue to get a lot of rainfall…” he said.
Not only in Peoria, but Ford also said Central Illinois has received more rain than the rest of the state.
“A lot of times when we have really active severe weather, it tends to come in those big linear features we would call squall lines that will produce rain, but the heaviest rain bands are tended to be more narrow, so you get a really short burst of rain, but it doesn’t really add up to much,” said Ford.
“In this case, we’ve seen storms that have sort of lingered, brought the severe weather punch, but also produced quite a bit of rainfall and, of course, flooding across the area, too.”
Tornadoes can occur anytime during the year, but June is the end of the peak season.
Increasingly frequent tornado seasons
This year follows a pattern, Ford said, where Illinois has seen its number of tornado confirmations increase in the past four years. In 2025, the number was 142. In 2024, there were about 120.
Assumptions may lead some to blame climate change as the culprit, but Ford said it is not that simple.
“It’s likely going to be an interplay of many different things happening, so weather variability that makes it so that year-to-year, decade-to-decade timescales, we’re going to get different conditions that make for more or less efficient, or more or less frequent tornadoes, and other types of severe weather, and that’s sort of what we’ve seen over the last few years,” he said.
In reality, Ford said the severe weather community has also gotten better at reporting tornadoes — and with more accuracy. Longer term trends point to conclusions aside from climate change itself.
“There’s still been a slight increase in tornadoes over the last 30 to 40 years in the Midwest, as well as the mid-south, however that trend has been very small,” Ford said. “We’ve seen more a tendency for more days with tornado outbreaks. Earlier tornadic activity in the year in February and March as opposed to April and May. Those are kind of longer-term trends.”
Then the big spike in the last four years, Ford said, is going from an average of about 50 to 60 tornadoes to over 100.
Ford said his educated guess would be the region can expect more severe weather through the rest of the season because of the continuing rainfall and normal temperatures.
“It’s probably not going to completely shut off. It may slow down as it tends to as we get into July,” he said. “We tend to see many fewer tornadoes in July, August, September than we do in May, June, but as long as we have the right conditions in place, which looks like they’re going to be there, we can [expect to see] a little bit more active severe weather…”
Ford said he is unsure if Illinois will continue to see another spike next year in the number of tornadoes.
“There’s no indication that this is likely to continue, at least not in perpetuity,” he said. “So, it’s more likely that what we’ve seen is just a short period of time with a very high frequency of severe weather, but not something that’s turning into a new normal or anything like that.”
