(Radio Iowa) – We’re just past the halfway point for Iowa’s tornado season, and while twisters can strike during any month of the year, April, May and June are considered the three prime months for tornadic activity. Meteorologist Mike Fowle, at the National Weather Service in Johnston, says it’s been a very active season so far.  “Our preliminary numbers suggest we have seen 43 tornadoes,” Fowle says. “Interestingly enough, all of those have occurred in the month of April. We are still investigating some reports back from our previous events, say from April 26th, we’re still investigating so it’s possible we could still add a tornado or two from some of these events.” While the tornado tally doesn’t set an Iowa record, Fowle says it -is- an impressive number.

“For 43 tornadoes for a month, that’s pretty darn high,” Fowle says. “We go back generally to about 1950 and forward as our more accurate trend of record, so that would have been the fourth highest number of tornadoes we’ve seen in any month, the highest being May of 2004 with 57.” We do live in tornado alley and some years they’re plentiful, while we’re spared in others. “In 2023, we had a total for the whole year in the state of Iowa of 72, while in 2022, we only had 42 for the entire year, so we obviously surpassed that in one month this year,” Fowle says, “and then if we go back even just one more year to 2021, we had a total of 114 tornadoes.”

The bulk of the 2021 tornadoes occurred on December 15th of that year, in a highly unusual late year outbreak. There were 63 tornadoes in Iowa that day, along with the first-ever December derecho anywhere in the U-S.