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Severe Weather 2026

Potentially a conditional strong tornado possible tonight in NE IL. Very strong LLJ may coincide with large vertical instability and semi discrete supercells. Storm mode however could easily congeal hence CONDITIONAL. Watching this overnight threat closely. 0-1km SRH of 350+
Well it is Illinois, wouldn’t shock me.. at 202 tornadoes, whats another few lol
 

I feel like this discourse happens every 2-3 months or so, and what always happens is any actual, meaningful discussion that could be had about any of these issues is just completely obliterated by some hothead with a big mouth and lack of self-reflection emitting a stream of verbal diarrhea on Twitter. Honestly had no idea this kerfuffle was even happening until now and it's literally the exact same re-hashed stuff.
 
I wanted to do a bit of math to truly see how viable it would be for Illinois to become the record holder for the most tornadoes in one state in a year. I went back and counted both the number of tornadoes in Texas in 2015, and the number of tornadoes in Illinois this year up to august 11th. For Texas i counted 241, (give or take one or two that I may have missed). For IL, i got an even 200 as of august 11th. (the same caveats apply as previous).

With these numbers, assuming illinois experiences tornadic activity at the same rate it has for the month of august (7 tornadoes in 11 days), it will hit 242 tornadoes before the start of november.

Now, this doesn't garuntee that Illinois will hit the record, as weather is very hard to predict long range, mutlitple seasonal changes might shift the focus of severe weather to different areas, and this is all using middle school level math.
 
I wanted to do a bit of math to truly see how viable it would be for Illinois to become the record holder for the most tornadoes in one state in a year. I went back and counted both the number of tornadoes in Texas in 2015, and the number of tornadoes in Illinois this year up to august 11th. For Texas i counted 241, (give or take one or two that I may have missed). For IL, i got an even 200 as of august 11th. (the same caveats apply as previous).

With these numbers, assuming illinois experiences tornadic activity at the same rate it has for the month of august (7 tornadoes in 11 days), it will hit 242 tornadoes before the start of november.

Now, this doesn't garuntee that Illinois will hit the record, as weather is very hard to predict long range, mutlitple seasonal changes might shift the focus of severe weather to different areas, and this is all using middle school level math.
Plus Texas is a LOT bigger. So in a way Illinois takes the prize.
 
Plus Texas is a LOT bigger. So in a way Illinois takes the prize.
Yeah texas is about 5x larger than Illinois. In terms of tornadoes per land area, texas 2015 comes in with 0.09 tornadoes per 100 square miles, while Illinois comes in with 0.3 tornadoes per square 100 miles, over 3 times that of texas.

In the end though, the record is not tornado density, but tornado count. It would also be really crazy and cool regardless for illinois to top texas despite size.
 
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