Tornadoes in New York City: 11 Since 1985, Ranked

The event that put NYC tornadoes back in the public imagination came on the evening of September 16, 2010. A fast, violent line of storms swept the city at rush hour and dropped two tornadoes within minutes: an EF1 in Flushing and Bayside, Queens, and an EF0 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Between them, in Middle Village and Forest Hills, a macroburst — a straight-line downdraft — hit with winds the National Weather Service estimated up to 125 mph, stronger than either tornado.

One person was killed: a driver whose car was crushed by a falling tree on the Grand Central Parkway. It is the only tornado fatality in the city’s SPC record. The storm destroyed thousands of trees across Queens and Brooklyn and left an estimated $65 million in damage (NWS New York). Emergency officials called it “practically a miracle” that the toll wasn’t far worse for a storm that hit one of the densest places in America with almost no warning. You can pull the actual conditions that evening, or any date since 1970, on our historical weather lookup.

Three years earlier, at dawn on August 8, 2007, the city’s most intense tornado on record touched down. Rated EF2 with winds near 135 mph, it formed over Staten Island, crossed the Narrows, and struck Bay Ridge, Brooklyn — the first tornado to hit Brooklyn since 1889. It carved a nearly six-mile damage path, tore roofs off homes, and injured nine people. The same morning storm flooded the subway system so badly the MTA nearly shut down, one of the worst weather-driven transit failures in the city’s history.

That an EF2 could rip through neighborhoods as dense as Staten Island and Bay Ridge without weakening is the whole point: the built environment does not stop tornadoes. For the top of the scale — the rare F4 and F5 monsters that NYC has never seen — see our roster of every EF5 tornado in US history and the ranked strongest and largest tornadoes ever recorded.

This is the detail almost every write-up misses. In the Plains, tornado season peaks hard in April and May. New York City’s does the opposite: ten of its 11 tornadoes struck in August, September or October — and all 11 between July and October. None has ever occurred in the spring severe-weather months of March, April or May. The reason is moisture. The city needs deep summer heat and a Gulf- or Atlantic-fed humid airmass to fuel the supercells and tropical bands that reach this far up the coast — conditions that peak alongside Atlantic hurricane season.

The tropical link is direct. The August 28, 2011 Queens tornado formed as Tropical Storm Irene made landfall over the city. Landfalling and near-miss tropical systems routinely drop brief spin-up tornadoes in their outer bands, and the Northeast coast catches them in exactly the late-August-to-October window the NYC record shows. It is a genuinely different tornado climate from the one most Americans picture.

Step just outside the city line and the numbers climb fast. Add Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties to the five boroughs and the SPC record holds 59 tornadoes for the greater New York City metro since 1950, with two deaths and a maximum rating of EF2. Long Island in particular is more tornado-prone than the boroughs — flat, exposed, and directly in the path of the same northeast-tracking storms. Statewide, New York has logged more than 500 tornadoes and 32 deaths, topping out at F4 upstate.

So the honest answer to “does NYC get tornadoes?” is: rarely inside the boroughs, more often just beyond them, and never as violently as the Plains or the South. Every one of them is plotted on our interactive tornado archive map — filter to New York and zoom into the harbor to see how close they get.