Tornadoes happen on every continent except Antarctica. The United States records by far the most, around 1,200 a year, but Canada is usually second, and Europe sees roughly 300 tornadoes over land in a typical year. Argentina, southern Brazil and Uruguay have their own tornado corridor, and Bangladesh has suffered the deadliest tornado on record, which killed about 1,300 people in 1989. What these places share is a meeting of warm, moist air near the ground with dry air and strong, changing winds above, the recipe for the rotating thunderstorms that produce the strongest tornadoes.
Why North America Gets So Many
To understand tornadoes elsewhere, it helps to see why the United States is exceptional. In spring, warm, humid air flows north from the Gulf of Mexico across the Great Plains, while dry air comes east off the Rocky Mountains and the Mexican plateau, and the jet stream brings strong winds high above. With no east–west mountain range to separate them, these air masses collide over a vast, flat area. The result is ideal conditions for supercells, thunderstorms with a rotating updraft, across the central states. That region is covered in our guide to Tornado Alley.
Canada, directly to the north, gets the same spring and summer patterns in weaker form. Since 2017 the Northern Tornadoes Project, run from Western University in Ontario, has investigated every reported storm using satellite images, drones and ground surveys, and it has found far more tornadoes than earlier records showed, often more than a hundred a year. That usually makes Canada second in the world. Many of them occur in the forests of northern Ontario and the Prairies, where few people see them. On 22 June 2007 a tornado at Elie, Manitoba, became the first in Canada to be officially rated F5, the top of the scale.
South America's Tornado Corridor
The closest match to the American Great Plains is in South America. East of the Andes, a flat plain runs across north-eastern Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil. Warm, moist air streams south from the Amazon on a low-level jet, dry air descends from the Andes, and the storms that result are among the most intense on Earth when measured by lightning and hail. The region is sometimes called the second most favourable place for tornadoes in the world. In 2018 and 2019 an international field campaign, RELAMPAGO, brought radars and storm chasers to central Argentina to study these storms, which can produce enormous hail. A hailstone that fell near Villa Carlos Paz in February 2018 may have been larger than the largest ever recorded in the United States.
Tornadoes there are less well documented, because the population is sparser and there has been no long tradition of recording them, but damaging tornadoes strike Buenos Aires province, Uruguay and southern Brazil most years.
Bangladesh and Eastern India: The Deadliest Tornadoes
Bangladesh does not have the most tornadoes, but it has the deadliest. The main season is the hot pre-monsoon period of March to May, when moist air from the Bay of Bengal meets hot, dry air from the plains of northern India under strong winds aloft, producing violent storms known locally as kalbaishakhi, or nor'westers.
On 26 April 1989 a tornado crossed the Daulatpur and Saturia areas of Manikganj district, north-west of Dhaka, and killed about 1,300 people, the highest death toll of any tornado on record. In May 1996 a tornado in the Tangail area killed around 700 people. The death tolls are so high not because the tornadoes are stronger than American ones, but because of very dense rural populations, homes of mud and corrugated metal, and the lack of warnings or shelters. India's neighbouring states of West Bengal, Odisha and Assam are also affected. Even Delhi has had a tornado: on 17 March 1978, one crossed the northern part of the city and killed about 28 people.
Europe: More Tornadoes Than Most People Think
Europe records roughly 300 tornadoes over land in an average year, plus many waterspouts over the Mediterranean and other seas, according to the European Severe Storms Laboratory, which keeps a continent-wide database. Most are weak, but not all. On 24 June 2021 a tornado tore through villages in South Moravia, in the Czech Republic, killing six people. It was rated IF4 and was the strongest tornado recorded in the country's modern history. On 9 June 1984 an outbreak of tornadoes north-east of Moscow, around Ivanovo and Yaroslavl, killed dozens of people, with some estimates in the hundreds.
The United Kingdom has a surprising number of small tornadoes, often thirty or more a year. Relative to its land area, it records more than most countries, by some counts more than the United States. Most are brief, weak tornadoes along cold fronts. The Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy also record tornadoes regularly.
East Asia and the Pacific
China records dozens of tornadoes a year, most in the flat, humid east, including the Yangtze and Huai river plains of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, and in Guangdong in the south. On 23 June 2016 a tornado rated EF4 struck Funing county in Jiangsu and killed 98 people, one of the deadliest in the country's history. Some Chinese tornadoes are spawned by typhoons as they come ashore.
Japan records around twenty to twenty-five tornadoes a year, many of them waterspouts coming ashore or tornadoes within typhoons. Australia and New Zealand also have tornadoes, especially in the south-east of Australia during winter cold fronts and in Queensland and New South Wales during summer storms. South Africa's high plateau, the Highveld, sees tornadoes most summers.
Waterspouts and Fire Tornadoes
Not every tornado forms over land or from a thunderstorm. Waterspouts, tornadoes over water, are common across warm seas, including the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Gulf of Mexico and the waters around the Florida Keys, which may see several hundred a year. Most are weak "fair-weather" waterspouts that form under growing cumulus clouds rather than supercells, but some come ashore as tornadoes along Mediterranean coasts in autumn.
Large wildfires can also produce tornado-strength vortices. In January 2003, a bushfire burning into the suburbs of Canberra, Australia, generated what researchers confirmed as a true fire tornado. In July 2018 the Carr Fire in northern California produced a fire whirl with winds estimated at EF3 strength that destroyed homes in Redding. As wildfires grow larger in a warming climate, such fire-generated vortices are attracting more study.
How Tornadoes Are Measured Around the World
Because nobody can put instruments inside a strong tornado, most are rated after the fact from the damage they cause. The Fujita scale, created by the Japanese-American meteorologist Ted Fujita in 1971, ran from F0 to F5. The United States replaced it with the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale in 2007, calibrated against how particular kinds of buildings fail. Canada uses its own version, and in 2023 the European Severe Storms Laboratory introduced the International Fujita (IF) scale, designed to work with European building styles and vegetation. Comparing ratings between countries is therefore tricky. A tornado that destroys a well-built brick house in Europe may be rated differently from one that flattens a wooden frame house in Kansas. How the spinning column itself forms is explained in how tornadoes form.
Why Records Outside the US Are Incomplete
The global map of tornadoes is partly a map of who is looking. The United States has radar coverage, storm spotters and a national agency that investigates every report. In much of Africa, South America and Asia, tornadoes in thinly populated areas may never be reported at all, and damage surveys are rare. Research projects keep revising the numbers upward, as Canada's Northern Tornadoes Project did. Satellite images of forests flattened in straight tracks through Siberia, Canada and the Amazon now reveal tornadoes that nobody witnessed. The countries at the top of the lists, compared in our ranking of the countries with the most tornadoes, may therefore change as detection improves.
Staying Safe Where Warnings Are Rare
Where tornadoes are infrequent, people often do not recognise the danger until it arrives. The basic advice is the same everywhere: get inside a strong building, go to the lowest floor, and put as many walls as possible between yourself and the outside, away from windows. In Bangladesh, the concrete cyclone shelters built along the coast over recent decades can also serve during tornadoes, and mobile phone alerts are improving warnings in rural areas. In Europe, the European Severe Storms Laboratory issues severe weather outlooks, and more countries now include tornado risk in their warnings rather than treating tornadoes as an American problem.
A Warming Climate
How climate change will affect tornadoes is still uncertain. The ingredients pull in different directions: warmer, moister air near the ground increases the energy available to storms, while some studies suggest the wind shear that organises them may weaken. In the United States there is evidence that tornado activity has shifted eastwards over recent decades, away from the traditional Plains and towards the mid-South, and that tornadoes are increasingly occurring in larger outbreaks. Whether similar shifts are happening elsewhere is hard to judge, because the records outside the United States are too short and incomplete to show clear trends.