Ask A Met: Why Doesn't My Town Get Tornadoes?

This week’s question comes from Morning Brief reader Kaeleigh who “was wondering why we never get tornadoes in Boonsboro, Maryland. Is it because of the mountains that surround us?” If you’ve wondered the same thing about your own town, this answer might interest you.

Meteorologist Sara Tonks: Well, there have been 3 tornadoes in Boonsboro. The most recent one was 2024, but there was one in 1999 and in 2004, as well. They were all pretty, pretty small.

One was an F1 and F0, so those were when we had the Fujita scale. Then we had an EF0, that was in 2024.

The most recent one was a “blink and you miss it” type thing.

Let me see here. It was about 4:40 EST in the afternoon on June 5th, 2024, Boonsboro, Washington County. It caused $0 for property damage, $0 for crop damage. The only reason we knew there was a tornado is because somebody caught it on video that day.

The one in 2004 was a bit more damaging. That one caused $120,000 worth of damage, property damage specifically, and then in 1999, that one did $75,000 worth of property damage.

But you are right that tornadoes are definitely not as common in your town as they are in other places.

Keep in mind, the United States gets more tornadoes than any other country in the world.

What fuels tornadoes in the central United States in places like Tornado Alley and in Florida are larger patterns that cause severe weather and have a lot of instability, which is what fuels severe weather.

Not only are the Plains positioned where they can get warm, moist air from the Gulf, but they're also in a location where cold fronts from low pressure systems coming out of Canada can sweep through, often off of The Rockies, bringing cold air. The cold air runs into this really warm, moist layer at the surface. That temperature difference is what kicks off instability and provides a lot of energy for storms to fire up.

Plus, storms coming off the Rockies encounter a sharp drop-off in terrain, which basically causes the air to stretch vertically. That stretching fuels rotation in the storm.

Then you have the jet stream that can be roaring overhead, creating wind shear, which feeds into the rotation that can produce tornadoes.

Because it's flat there, storms don't have much friction to fight against as they're building and as they're strengthening. So when you have a strengthening updraft and strengthening downdraft plus wind shear from the jet stream, you can get rotation in the cloud.

Then it goes [makes an incomprehensible sound to mimic the formation of a tornado].

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