Tornadoes in Tulsa: 216 Since 1950, Ranked

On the evening of April 24, 1993, an F4 tornado tore through Catoosa and east Tulsa, killing 7 people and injuring about 100. Per the Tulsa World, it remains the deadliest tornado in local history — and the last time an F4 touched Tulsa or Rogers County. More than three decades later, no stronger tornado has hit the metro. For a metro this size in this part of Oklahoma, that is a genuinely long run of good fortune.

The metro’s only other F4 came two years earlier, on April 26, 1991, tracking through northern Rogers County on the same regional outbreak day that produced the catastrophic Andover, Kansas F5 to the north. It injured 22 people in the Tulsa box but killed no one. Two F4s, thirty-plus years apart, are the ceiling of Tulsa’s recorded violence.

Tulsa’s single busiest tornado year on record was 2019, with 17 tornadoes in the metro box — and it is no coincidence that it landed in the same spring as the historic Arkansas River flooding, when releases from Keystone Dam pushed the river to near-record crests through the metro. The same stalled, moisture-loaded pattern that dropped repeated rounds of heavy rain also fired repeated rounds of severe storms and tornadoes. Tulsa’s worst weather years tend to work this way: not one headline tornado, but a wet, unsettled spring that stacks up tornado after tornado.

That pattern — frequent weaker tornadoes embedded in wet outbreak clusters — is what separates Tulsa’s record from the dryline-driven violence of central Oklahoma. You can pull the actual conditions for any Tulsa tornado day, back to 1970, on our historical weather lookup.

It is worth sitting with how unusual Tulsa’s record is. Oklahoma has recorded more F5/EF5 tornadoes than any other state; the Oklahoma City metro to the southwest has been hit by multiple EF5s and holds some of the most extreme tornado statistics on Earth. Tulsa, 100 miles to the northeast, sits in the same state and the same Tornado Alley — and has never once recorded an F5, with only two F4s in 74 years. Geography inside Oklahoma matters: the violent dryline supercells that hit the central and western parts of the state often weaken or transition to messier, rain-wrapped storms by the time they reach the wetter, more forested northeast.

None of which makes Tulsa safe — three tornadoes a year and a genuinely deadly F4 in living memory are proof enough. But it does mean the honest answer to “how common are tornadoes in Tulsa?” is: common, mostly weak, occasionally deadly, and never yet the worst Oklahoma can produce. See how the metro’s events stack up nationally in our deadliest tornadoes in US history ranking.