PITTSBURGH — Last year was a record year for tornadoes in Western Pennsylvania.
We’ve already had several tornadoes touch down in our area this year. Pittsburgh’s Chief Meteorologist Stephen Cropper took a look at the weather phenomenon to learn whether we could expect to see more regularly.
We had the kind of weather that made a lot of us feel like we were living in the Midwest, known as tornado alley, for its strong, frequent and dangerous storms.
“It just appeared, in front of me, right there, a perfect cone, like you see in a movie,” Finleyville resident Gene Abel recalled, as he talked to Stephen about the wicked storms that ripped through his town last year. Abel was caught outside in one of the strongest storms, an EF2, with winds close to 120 miles an hour. Abel had no time to head for cover.
“You better hold on, that’s as quick as it was.”
Colton Milcarek is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh. Milcarek says 2024 was a busy season.
“In fact, the busiest season that we’ve seen,” he said.
The National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh confirmed 29 tornadoes in Pennsylvania last year. Nineteen of those were in Western PA.
“That is the most tornadoes we have recorded,” said Milcarek.
Paul Markowski is a professor of meteorology at the Penn State University Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science. He has been studying tornado trends in our area and says that while we did see more tornadoes last year, it doesn’t mean that’s the new normal.
“If you lived in the Pittsburgh area, where you had a local clustering of tornadoes in 2024, I’m sure it did feel really unusual to you,” said Markowski. “I don’t really read anything into the tornado count for 2024 or the start we’ve gotten off to in 2025.”
He says a few busy tornado days can make a severe weather season seem bigger than it is.
“One day something strange can happen and all of the sudden it looks like the whole year has been a big tornado year,” said Markowski.
Most of our tornadoes come in the spring and summer, but cool-season tornadoes are now spinning up more often, like the five we saw in March and the record-breaking 10 in October 2021. which means tornadoes can happen any time of the year.
“In this year and the past year we had a couple of those cool season tornadoes, so even just recently this month in March 2025, we had five tornadoes and that’s quite abnormal for this time of year-especially this early in the season,” said Milcarek.
“If you get June conditions in January, you’ll have a June-like outcome in January, so the atmosphere doesn’t care about the calendar,” said Markowski.
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