Within Twenty-Five Miles

The Storm Prediction Center forecasts a tornado as the chance of one within twenty-five miles of you. This is that question backwards: how many have already come that close?

The forecast, right now

Asking the Storm Prediction Center…

Under the cursor

—move over the map

Tornadoes within twenty-five miles

050+

each recorded track, thickened by rating

an F4, of which New York has two

today’s tornado outlook contour

Show

Watch every one of them arrive in order → Seventy-three years, each one travelling the path that was written down for it.

New York on the record

Two things this cannot tell you

The record grows because the watching does. Doppler radar arrived in the 1990s and the spotter networks with it, and a weak tornado that crossed an empty field in 1961 is simply not in this file.

The Center’s database is American and stops at the border, so along the St. Lawrence and the Niagara frontier a point’s twenty-five miles reach into Ontario and come back empty.

The colour stops at the state line but the counting does not. A point in Chautauqua County has Pennsylvania inside its twenty-five miles, and every Pennsylvania tornado is in its total.