The recent spate of deadly tornadoes in the state hint at a troubling new reality: Violent storms are seemingly becoming a more common part of life in Arkansas.

The number of reported tornadoes hitting Arkansas every year is up, according to the Arkansas Tornado Database, which uses data from the National Weather Service. Between 1970 and 1999, Arkansas saw an average of 25 tornadoes a year. That figure rose to an average 37 tornadoes a year between 1991 and 2020. And a 2022 study from the City University of New York suggested that “Dixie Alley,” a tornado-prone part of the southeast United States, has been producing more tornadoes than it used to. That’s troubling news for northeast to Central Arkansas, which falls within the Dixie Alley boundaries.

A string of tornadoes hit Arkansas on March 14 and 15, smashing up rural Jackson, Sharp and Independence counties, killing three people, injuring several more, and leaving destruction across the region. Cushman and Cave City were hit particularly hard, and Diaz saw a violent EF-4 tornado with wind speeds of up to 190 miles per hour. In a March 21 letter to the Trump administration requesting federal aid , Gov. Sarah Sanders estimated that 156 buildings were destroyed and another 181 sustained major or minor damage.

“The damage has been most extensive around Diaz and some of Campbell Station, they got hit really hard,” Jackson County Judge Jeff Phillips told the Arkansas Times on April 30. “Whether the governor can get the president to reverse the FEMA decision, I haven’t heard.”

As Phillips said, the Trump administration rejected a request by Sanders and Arkansas’s congressional delegation for a major disaster declaration that would allow federal aid to flow in from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Then, in early April, another two tornadoes hit the ground in eastern Arkansas near Almyra in Arkansas County and Lake City in Craighead County, causing more damage but no more loss of life. Sanders estimated the April storms produced up to $25 million in infrastructure damage. Sanders appealed the FEMA decision , but affected Arkansans continue to wait to see if they will get aid for rebuilding.

Arkansas is only halfway through the traditional tornado season of March through May, and the state has already seen a few EF-4 tornadoes, defined as having wind speeds of between 166 and 200 miles per hour.

Last year was the busiest storm year of the 2020s, with 52 total tornadoes recorded, and the Memorial Day weekend twister outbreak that hammered Benton, Marion, Boone and Baxter counties, which caused 10 deaths and dozens of injuries.

Before that, in March 2020, a strong tornado smashed through Jonesboro, injuring 22 people. In 2023, another tornado ripped through Little Rock, North Little Rock, Sherwood and Jacksonville, causing an estimated $90 million in damages.

“My observation is that we have had an active spring and 2025 has been very active and well above normal when it comes to severe thunderstorm warning and severe thunderstorm counts,” Zachary Hall, a storm-tracking social media influencer said. “Our tornado average has increased. That is an indisputable increase. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that we are experiencing unprecedented numbers when it comes to tornadoes.”

Through his accounts called Zachary Hall- Arkansas Storm Tracker , Hall has amassed thousands of followers who look to him for weather and storm updates in Arkansas. Hall used to “storm chase” after studying meteorology in college, but now he does full-time weather forecasting from his home on his various social media accounts.

Hall emphasized that data collection on tornadoes has improved due to the advent of dual polarization radar and cell phones, and it’s hard to say whether or not tornadoes have increased or they are just being captured better. He also stressed that some years are more active than others and Arkansas has always seen tornadic activity.

“In the last couple of years we have seen an uptick, though, but there might be some recency bias there. We always go through times when we have extremes,” Hall said. “But I do feel like, and I have recency bias here because I’ve only been doing this full-time since 2019, but I do feel like Central and eastern Arkansas have been more active over the last decade.”

So what gives? Are these increased tornadoes ravaging eastern and Central Arkansas an act of God? Are they even notable given that Arkansas has always had tornadoes? Is it just recency bias and improved data collection? What about the bad words… human-caused climate change ?

It turns out that it’s complicated.

“What I do know is that we have studies that confirm that tornado counts across the southeastern United States have increased,” Hall said. “When it comes to climate change, I feel like it is something that we should be studying and taking note of. I can’t say that climate change is the direct cause because I just don’t know that for sure.”

La Niña, climate change, and a shifting Tornado Alley?

According to Dr. Dorian Burnette, an associate professor and meteorologist at the University of Memphis, how strong tornadic activity in the southern United States might be in a certain year starts with whether the Pacific Ocean is experiencing an El Niño or La Niña year. In El Niño, warmer surface water pushes warm wind from the Pacific Ocean toward the United States’ west coast, high up in the atmosphere. While in La Niña conditions, colder air pushes toward the south. El Niño and La Niña are cyclical patterns, but don’t necessarily occur on a set schedule.

Burnette explained that scientists have found that when colder air from La Niña smashes into warmer air from the Gulf of Mexico in southern skies, the result tends to create the conditions for more tornadoes. Scientists have found that the Gulf of Mexico warmed at twice the rate of other ocean regions between 1970 and 2020 , according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Tornadoes tend to like La Niña conditions better in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, eastern portions of the plains, and into the mid South. It guarantees nothing, but it can certainly load the dice and make things more likely,” Burnette said. “Some of our biggest tornado outbreaks, like this year for example, were coming out of a La Niña, though right now there are average conditions in the eastern Pacific. But what matters ultimately, is what mode you came out of sometimes. A winter time La Niña signature has shown to influence March, April and May tornado counts. And another thing is what are the average temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico like?”

So La Niña is partly to blame for how bad the tornadoes have been this year, according to Burnette. And a warming Gulf of Mexico from climate change probably doesn’t help either. But it’s more complicated than that.

Burnette said that from the 1950s to today, “a large chunk” of the increased tornadoes are probably due to better detection methods and data collection related to storms. But, he also emphasized that the scientific literature from the 1970s to today shows there’s been a decrease in tornadoes in the southern Great Plains states — the region usually thought of as “Tornado Alley” — while an increase has occurred in the southern Mississippi River valley, including Arkansas.

“That has been detected as in the numbers, but the increase in the southern Mississippi River Valley is not the same magnitude as the decrease out there in the plains. So it is decreasing out there in the plains, but not as much as it is increasing here,” Burnette said. “Are tornadoes moving out of Tornado Alley and into the Southeast? That is probably not the correct way to say it. Tornado Alley isn’t going anywhere, and the alley here in the southern United States called ‘Dixie Alley’ has been known for some time.”

So maybe Tornado Alley is slowly leaving Oklahoma and coming to Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, but it could just be that Dixie Alley is getting worse. Either way, Burnette said, we don’t have the data over a long enough period of time yet to say if the shift is due to human-caused climate change, or if the shift is definitely occurring. But he thinks we will know soon.

“It might not be too much longer, it might just be a year or two down the road. When are we going to get 30 years of data from the new radars? Because 30 years of data is the default to where climatological averages are built from,” Burnette said. “It might not take too long for a signature to pop out because we can do some neat things with computer modeling these days to be able to detect that.”