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After a record-breaking 2024, Iowa is having one of the quietest tornado years in more than 6 decades
Iowa has recorded just seven confirmed tornadoes in the first six months of 2025, partly due to jet streams from the Gulf hitting neighboring states

Jul. 6, 2025 5:30 am, Updated: Jul. 7, 2025 12:46 pm
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Last year, Iowa surpassed the state record for tornadic activity in a single calendar year. But this year, the skies have been quiet.
In fact, fewer than a dozen tornadoes have been reported in the first six months of the year, and that includes the months that are typically described as “peak tornado season.”
Background
History was made in 2024 when a record 125 tornadoes touched down in Iowa, surpassing the previous record of 120 tornadoes in 2004.
The number of tornadoes striking Iowa in a year varies greatly, but the average is about 50. And while twisters can strike outside peak tornado season — the state recorded 61 on Dec. 15, 2021 — the typical tornado season in Iowa runs from April 1 through June 30.
Since 1980, more than 1,900 twisters have touched Iowa ground.
What’s happened since
Iowa, in the first six months of 2025, has seen the fewest confirmed tornadoes since 1961, said William Gallus, a professor in the department of the Earth, Atmosphere and Climate at Iowa State University.
“This is the lowest most people would have experienced in their lifetime,” he said.
Gallus said the lack of activity this year is atypical.
“It has been very unusual, because it's not like we've had a weather pattern where the entire northern or northern central part of the country has had low numbers,” Gallus said. The “states all around us are having a very active year for tornadoes.”
Gallus said this is due to the jet stream from the Gulf of Mexico — the body of water that was renamed Gulf of America by the Trump administration. That jet stream has been hitting the Midwest, east and south of Iowa.
“The Gulf of Mexico, which tends to be the fuel for the thunderstorms that are able to produce tornadoes, (has) been very warm compared to normal, just like last year,” Gallus said. “Last year was the most tornadoes we've ever seen in Iowa, so what seems to have happened, from what I have seen, is we got lucky.”
Those areas east and south of Iowa — Illinois and Missouri — each have had more than 100 tornadoes so far this year, mimicking what Iowa saw last year.
When the jet stream from the Gulf shifted north — which is typical in the summer months — it moved north of Iowa, hitting the Dakotas and Minnesota.
“So those tornadoes, and the good conditions for the tornadoes, have sort of skipped, skipped over Iowa and are missing us to the north,” he said.
In order to form, tornadoes need instability — the energy that fuels thunderstorms — that happens when hot air rises and traps warm air beneath it.
Gallus said tornadoes also require a vertical wind shear — a change in wind speed or direction — to form.
A changing climate
Despite very few confirmed tornadoes so far this year — seven have been confirmed — Gallus said that doesn’t mean Iowa is out of the woods.
As the climate changes, he said, the typical tornado season is expanding to all months of the year, even December.
“We should still expect to see the (tornado) season expanding as long as the planet is continuing to warm,” Gallus said. “That should allow the ingredients for tornadoes to extend later into the fall or even into the winter and to start up again earlier in spring.”
Gallus said that all seven confirmed tornadoes so far this year have been relatively weak.
On the Enhanced Fujita Scale, experts measure the severity of tornadoes on a six-point scale, from EF0, which have winds from 65-85 mph, to EF5, which have winds of more than 200 mph.
Of the seven tornadoes in Iowa this year, five have been EF0, and two were measured as an EF1.
Gallus said all seven tornadoes have occurred at the edges of the state, with three confirmed tornadoes in far southwest Iowa, two in the far southeast corner of the state near the Mississippi River, and two in north central Iowa, near the Minnesota border.
He said one reason Iowa has seen so few tornadoes this year is due to Mother Nature trying to “average things back toward normal.”
“In a way, the fact that this year has been very quiet, if you put that together with last year, it probably averages that out,” he said. “Over the two years we had about the normal number. It's just one of those funny coincidences, that we went from the most active year ever to one of the least active.”
Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.
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