Ticker for January 12, 2026

                
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January 12, 2026   January 12, 2026   January 12, 2026   January 12, 2026


More on tornadoes




More on last week's tornadoes, and yes, tornadoes are definitely morons. And no,
I'm not worried about angering them since I've already had an EF5 visit my
old neighborhood. What...ya got an EF6, Mother Nature? I don't think so.

Anyway, there have been a total of 35 confirmed tornadoes during the month of
January since 1950 in Oklahoma, and 1/7th of them occurred last week. Now that
total is preliminary and could go up, but it won't go down. So January 2026 has
now tied January 2023 for the most tornadoes during, uhhhhhh, January, since
accurate records began in 1950. So nearly a third of all January tornadoes have
occurred in the last four years.

Further, and farther too, if you add the three that we saw in 2020, and the four
in 2021, 17 of the 35--or nearly half--have come in the last seven years.

The biggie we saw this year was the EF2 that hit Purcell, to go along with an
EF0 and three EF1 twisters. So that EF2 was pretty strong for January, We had
another F2 (sorry, there were no E's back in the 70s, which means the Bee Gees
would simply be The B Gs) back on Jan. 18, 1973, near Seminole that was quite
damaging and injured four.

But 1967 was the big year, despite only (ONLY?? HA!) four tornadoes that January,
three were F2s, including again another baddie near Afton that injured six.

There was another F2 on Jan. 14, 1960, as well as two more on Jan. 22, 1957.

But the Granddaddy of all January tornadoes had to be the violent F4 monster
that struck the northeast side of Gans on Jan. 22, 1957, killing 10 and injuring
20. An entry about the tornado on Wikipedia says the twister "produced extreme
ground scouring before entering into Gans, digging a trench up to 3 feet deep
in one instance."

There were also a couple of F2s that same day in Oklahoma.

So 10 of the 35 January tornadoes have been (E)F2s, and one was that F4. I
haven't gone through the rest of the months (DAMMIT JIM, I'M A DOCTOR, NOT A
TORNADO-OLOGIST!), but a 31% significant tornado (EF2-EF5, or F2-F5) seems
impressive. Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but maybe that has to do
with the strength of the jet stream during the winter months, including January?

Interesting, and albeit unfortunate. I'd rather have boring, like what we see
for the next 7-10 days.





A few cold fronts here and there, and also some unfortunate fire-danger days
coming up this week.





The rain part of last week's storm wasn't boring, at least.



Unless you were in NW or SE OK, of course.



We CAN have rain without tornadoes, ya know. The next rain...not showing up,
however.

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climate Survey
gmcmanus@ou.edu