Taking cover in the bathroom of his second-floor hotel room, junior Simon Pick hid as a tornado touched down seven miles from the Science Olympiad team’s hotel in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
“It was kind of scary ’cause we were in the lobby [earlier],” said Pick. “ … It seemed like the people in the lobby were saying, ‘Oh, just go back to your rooms, and don’t stay near windows,’ which kind of felt contradictory to what I learned before that you’re supposed to stay on the lowest floor.”
Illinois has had a historic year, breaking two tornado-related records since official tracking began in 1950, with 77 tornadoes in the Chicago area and 212 statewide as of September 14, 2026. Illinois averaged 54 tornadoes per year from 1991 to 2020.
As Tornado Alley shifts eastward, consequences include major metropolitan areas dealing with potential catastrophic tornado damage, said Albert Ramon, chief meteorologist at CBS News Chicago.
“This is a new normal, and we gotta start thinking about preparedness … ,” said Ramon. “Where are we going to go when warnings are issued? We are in a new digital world where less and less people … [are] going to traditional TV anymore — they’re getting [information] from their apps, but are they getting the vital information in those extreme weather events where it’s life and death?”
According to Pick, without his phone alarm announcing the tornado warning, he wouldn’t have known to go to the lobby from his room in the first place.
The area where tornadoes occur most frequently is shifting.
Tornado Alley is an informal definition given to the region of the United States where tornadoes are most common, traditionally stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and east into Minnesota and Iowa, with some maps being drawn as far as Illinois, said Jeff Frame, teaching professor in the department of climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
According to David Yeomans, meteorologist at CBS News Chicago, climate scientists have long thought from their research that as the climate warms, the usual Tornado Alley gets drier and hotter, which could shift tornado ingredients eastward toward the Mississippi River or even Illinois.
“This [shift] fits what climate researchers expect as the world continues to warm up, and this is not a one-year blip either: Illinois has led the nation now in tornado count three out of the last four years,” Yeomans said.
Climate change creates conditions favorable to tornado formation.
“What we do see is that as the climate warms, the dice are getting loaded such that storm systems increasingly have the combination of strong wind shear and strong moisture and heat coming off the Gulf of Mexico so that when [storms] do happen, they’re more likely to produce hazardous weather,” said Steve Nesbitt, professor of climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Limitations of current climate models make it difficult to claim that climate change is responsible for Illinois’ historic tornado count in 2026.
“Climate models are what we use to figure out if we can attribute certain events to climate, and climate models are really good at giving you a big, global scale and at estimating out into the future,” said Fiona Lo, climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
According to Yeomans, a climate model is kind of like an old standard-definition television because it breaks up Earth’s surface into big chunks, which makes for a blurry screen that cannot resolve really small-scale features like tornadoes.
A tornado shattered windows at a hotel near Pick’s.
“I think that it’s important to know [about changes in tornado frequency and location] because it’s not normal to have all these tornadoes, or at least it’s something very new, and it’s something that we should probably be prepared for,” Pick said.