“IS TORNADO ALLEY DYING?”

The question has been whispered – and then asked aloud – after years of remarkably low tornado numbers in the Great Plains.

“It’s a question worth asking,” says Grady Dixon, dean of the Werth College of Science, Technology and Mathematics at Fort Hays State University.

Some are already offering opinions. In a special program last year commemorating the 15th anniversary of the devastating tornado that nearly scoured the central Kansas town of Greensburg off the map in 2007, Wichita’s ABC affiliate referred to Tornado Alley in the past tense.

Only Texas averages more tornadoes per year than Kansas, according to data gathered

“I think you can definitely see that we’re in a pattern of change right now,” Butler County Emergency Management Director Keri Korthals says. “Whether you want to get into that political hotbed of ‘Is it global warming? Is it climate change?’ Or do you want to just say, ‘What’s our trend right now? What do we have to be ready for?’”

The term "Tornado Alley" was never meant to be used or taken seriously by the general public, Dixon says. It came into use in 1952, when two Air Force meteorologists used it in the title of their research into severe weather in the Midwest. “That was really for tornado scientists, to identify a place in the country where tornadoes were predictable, visible and traceable” for the sake of conducting research, he says.

The Great Plains is ideal for that, he says, because peak tornado season in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas is May and June. The flat terrain and robust roadway infrastructure in those states makes