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| This photo is regarded as the first photo taken of a tornado. It was in April, 1884 in Garnett, Kansas. Photo by A.A Adams |
Over the years, some tornadoes create iconic images that last forever and are referenced by experts, whether geeks and others as incredibles bits of history.
Here are some of the most iconic images of tornadoes over the years.
FIRST PHOTOGRAPH
There are many candidates vying for the first photograph of a tornado ever taken. Almost all of those candidates have been proven to be fakes, or so altered that they really don't depict what was going on.
But one widely recognized photo is considered the first one. It shows a long, skinny funnel extending out at an angle from a dark cloud. It looks like a tornado that's "roping out." That means the tornado is beginning to dissipate. It stretches out and gets narrow until it falls apart.
Unlike other supposed first tornado photos, this one taken by a fruit farmer named. A.A Adams makes sense. The clouds look like they would in a "normal" tornado, not some idealized version of one. The tornado hit Garnett, Kansas on April 26, 1884. It damaged some homes and barns and supposedly carried a man and his wagon through the air, injuring him.
This doesn't mean the danger is over. Supercell thunderstorms sometimes cycle tornadoes. One dies, and later on, a new one will develop.
I don't know if that's the case with this one.
Worcester, Massachusetts, June 9, 1953:
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| The Worcester County, Massachusetts tornado on June 9, 1953 |
This was a Midwest style, highly destructive wedge tornado. It looked very much like the famous 2013 EF-5 in the Oklahoma City area, and not something that could ever happen in New England. But it did.
The photo is striking because you see that classic Plains wedge shaped twister with an equally classic looking large New England farmhouse in the foreground. The dichotomy between the tornado and the house its incredibly striking
The photo, taken by Henry LaPrade, also shows the classic wall cloud/mesoscale supporting the tornado from above.
As bad as Worcester tornado was, it was even the whole story. The day before Worcester was hit, he same storm system created an F5 tornado that devastated the northern part of Flint, Michigan and the suburb of Beecher, killing 116 people and injuring 844. A photograph of the Flint tornado is eerily similar to the Worcester tornado pictured here.
1953 was a horrible tornado year. Earlier that spring, on May 11, another powerful tornado swept through Waco, Texas, killing 114 people
Goshen, Indiana, April 11, 1965
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| The double tornado image taken during the Palm Sunday Tornado outbreak in 1965. This was in Goshen Indiana. Photo by Paul Huffman. |
Huffman worked at the Elkhart Indiana Truth, the local paper. That day, he was driving down Route 33 with his wife when the saw a towering black cloud. At first they thought it was a fire.
They then realized it was a tornado. Huffman never left the house without his camera, so he pulled it out, went outside the car and starting taking pictures. Huffman kept himself steady in the intenser winds by swinging his leg around his car's bumper.
Hid photo, including the famous double tornado image and others he took that day, are at this link.
Judging from his other photos, I'm not 100 percent convinced he photographed two tornadoes. Intense tornadoes often have multiple vortices within them. Essentially tornadoes within tornadoes. It looks like the photo captured two intense vortices within the parent tornado.
Huffman, however, the storm contained two distinct funnels as it went through, so I can't be sure what happened.
This tornado moved on to blast through a mobile home park. Later that day, a second intense tornado would go through the same mobile home park. Thirty-three people died in that mobile home park. Huffman also took heartrending photos of rescuers trying to help the injured in the immediate aftermath of the tornado,
It was part of the large Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1965, one of the worst in modern history. Around 50 tornadoes killed 271 people and injured more than 3,500. Indiana was hardest hit, and the tornado outbreak is still the worst in Indiana history.
Topeka, Kansas, June 8, 1966
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| One of Perry Riddle's photos showing people fleeing a Topeka, Kansas F5 tornado in 1966. |
The tornado caused more than $200 million in damages, in 1966 dollars. That would be more than $2 billion in 2026 dollars.
Seventeen people lost their lives in the process. The photo to me is iconic a it shows what appears to be a Midwestern family scrambling for shelter, with the large, black tornado looming behind them. The shadows cast by the clouds and the tornado almost turn the family into silhouettes, making the image all the more foreboding.
The photo was taken by Perry Riddle as people ran for cover into the Countryside United Methodist Church at 3221 SW Burlingame Road. I was unable to determine whether the tornado hit the church, but the lean of the tornado funnel suggests that it missed that location.
Riddle took numerous photos of the tornado from that church parking lot, and they are amazingly high quality, especially for 1966. You can see the other photos in the second half of a YouTube video at this link.
Xenia, Ohio, April 3, 1974.
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| Terrifying image of an F5 tornado tearing through Xenia, Ohio in April, 1974. Image the hour inside that black maelstrom |
The outbreak produced 148 tornadoes in the 13 states and Ontario, Canada. Thirty of them were F4s or F5s, the strongest type. The outbreak caused 335 direct fatalities and injured 6,000 people.
Probably the worst tornado in the outbreak struck Xenia, a city of about 25,000 people in southwest Ohio. This one reminds me of the Joplin, Missouri tornadoes years later, as both cut through the heart of a small city. In both cases the tornadoes reached maximum strength while cutting through the middle of the communities.
The photo was taken by Fred Stewart, the public information director at Greene Memorial Hospital. He was also a photography buff. He took the photo through a window on the second floor stairwell at the hospital. The window looked out over the Pinecrest Gardens neighborhood of Xenia
The following information comes from the April 6 1974 edition of the Xenia Daily Gazette.
"'It looked like it was going to come straight to the hospital,' he said. 'But then it veered off and hit Pinecrest Gardens. The air was filled with debris. I shot four frames before I headed back to the basement.'
The photo is terrifying as you know just beyond the parking lot, in that black maw of a terrifying tornado, death and ruin is raining down on that neighborhood.
Makes me sad every time I see the photo.
Fridley, Minnesota, July 18, 1986
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| Screen shot of a Minnesota tornado filmed from a traffic helicopter in 1986. |
That day, a traffic helicopter with KARE in Minneapolis was able to follow a tornado in Brooklyn Park and Fridley, about 15 miles north of Minneapolis. It is the first known, widely distributed video of a tornado taken from the air.
The footage was dramatic, with the tornado yanking trees out of the woods and flinging them far outside the twister. It's still one of the more dramatic tornado videos out there. Which is saying something considering we're now in the age of drones and remote videos that can really uncover some amazing tornado image.
This particular tornado was rated an F2, and damaged a few dozen buildings.
Andover, Kansas, April 26, 1991
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| Image is a little fuzzy because it's a screen grab from a video, but Duke Evans' video of an EF-5 tornado in Andover, Kansas was considered the best video up until its time of a powerful tornado. The twister passed just behind that row of houses. The occupants had to be terrified. |
On April 26, 1991, a tornado outbreak in the central United States produced at least 55 tornadoes, resulting in 21 deaths. The most powerful and destructive of the tornadoes was an F-5, the strongest kind, in Andover, Kansas.
Duke Evans took out his camcorder and filmed more the six minutes of the Andover tornado's rampage. At the tine it was considered the highest quality tornado footage ever produced. I imagine the film was studies by many tornado experts and in meteorology classrooms everywhere.
The most terrifying part of the video is when it goes just behind a row of houses. If anyone was in those houses huddling in a closet or basement, the screaming roar of the tornado must have shaken them to their bones.
Since then, now that we're in the age of everyone having a camera phone, it seems almost every tornado is well documented. But Evans' was the first in a cottage industry: America's Most Terrifying Tornado.
We'll revisit Andover and another tornado later in this post.
Jarrell, Texas, May 21, 1997
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| The Jarrell, Texas tornado as it was developing. Multiple vortices - mini tornadoes within the main tornado are visible, giving a dead man walking looks to the storm, The tornado became extremely powerful and essentially stalled over a subdivision killing 17 people |
The photo of the tornado is called "Dead Man Walking" and you can see why. The photo was taken while the tornado was rapidly powering up to it F5 status.
As I mentioned above in the Palm Sunday, 1965 piece, powerful tornadoes often have multiple vortices. Essentially tornadoes spinning within the parent tornado.
The photo was taken by Scott Beckwith as he stood outside the building housing his employer, Jarrell Farm Supply.
He caught the beginning stages of the tornado, when it began as a narrow, almost harmless looking rope, to the Dead Man Walking photo that because famous.
Knowing what happened after the photo was taken, the tornado with its vortices inside it really looks a sort of grim reaper heading toward a neighborhood to take a lot of lives.
Which is precisely what this tornado did. It headed slowly southwestward, the opposite direction of most tornadoes.
A typical tornado's forward speed is about 20 mph and can be 50 mph or more in some instances. The powerful F5 tornado then did the worst thing possible. It essentially stalled over the Double Creek Estates Subdivision. It sat there crawling forward ever so slowly through the subdivision, with its 260 mph winds, for three minutes.
The people in the subdivision's houses never stood a chance.
The winds were so strong, and lasted so long, that every piece of several homes was swept completely away from foundations and ground to small pieces. Some construction material was pulverized down to dust. Asphalt was lifted off the street and blown away. Cars blew half a mile or more away from where they had been parked.
The destruction was arguably the most extreme of any tornado seen in the United States.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, April 27, 2011
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| The Tuscaloosa, Alabama tornado of April 27, 2011 seemed to have tentacles coming out of it |
Many of these deaths occurred in what I'd call the Super Duper Tornado outbreak of April 25-28. 2011. This one far outdid the famous 1974 Super Outbreak with tragic results.
According to the Weather Channel:
"An incredible 349 tornadoes were spawned in just 72 hours April 25-28, according to NOAA. While the Deep South - Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee - bore the brunt o fit, tornadoes tore through parts of 21 states from Texas to central New York.
According to the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, 929 tornado warnings were issued by 44 different National Weather Service offices from April 25-29."
Also, 199 tornadoes occurred on just one day - April 27. The normal amount of tornadoes in the U.S. during the entire month of April is 194.
The Tuscaloosa, Alabama tornado during this outbreak really stands out. It wasn't the strongest of the outbreak as there were four EF-5 tornadoes and the Tuscaloosa storm was "only" an EF-4 with top winds of ???
This tornado claimed 65 lives along an 80-mile path from Greene County, Alabama, through Tuscaloosa and into the northern suburbs of Birmingham, the Weather Channel notes. Despite the very high death toll, the fact that this powerful tornado rolled through such high populated areas speaks well to the warnings from the National Weather Service and local television stations.
A fascinating aspect of the visuals on this tornado were the horizontal vortices wrapping around the tornado. You see that sometimes in the most ferocious tornadoes. It always makes me think these tornado are sentient monsters with tentacles trying to pick people off the streets.
Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011
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| The view out a van window as their occupants were trying desperately to flee the EF-5 Joplin, Missouri tornado in 2011. If you click on the photo to make it bigger and if you look closely, you can see the tornado looming just a very short distance away |
The tornado killed 161 people, making if the deadliest tornado since 1953 and the nations seventh deadliest on record.
The tornado also showed what a monster tornado can look like, and how it can give people who are used to big storms a false sense of security.
The tornado was wrapped in rain, and just looked like a big ugly black cloud approaching. It seemed to be a nasty storm looming, for sure, but not the cataclysm it turned out to be.
There's a haunting must-see YouTube video taken from inside a van with several knowledgeable storm chasers inside. They know that black mass looming behind the buildings they are passing is a highly dangerous tornado. The van load of storm chasers know they have to get out of the way very quickly or they will be hit and quite possibly killed by the twister.
Their escape is hindered by people keeping to routines as if death was not looming in that black cloud.
The notes on the YouTube video say:
"It is interesting to note that many drivers on the road were completely oblivious to the sirens, and were driving and texting on their cellphones instead of observing the approaching tornado and trying to get out of its path. Most of us felt sick afterwards, but it actually sank in a few hours/days later as we really had no idea what was actually happening in Joplin."
Part of the reason the video is so haunting is because many of the buildings that the van drove past were reduced to ruins moments later. Subsequent videos of the aftermath proved that.
The people in the van are increasingly panicked as the tornado closes in, but they manage to get onto Interstate 44 and speed away from the twister in the nick of time.
That photo of the black mawing mass looming over Joplin still gives me chills.
Andover, Kansas, April 29, 2022
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| An incredible still from a wild video taken via drone and produced by famed storm chaser Reed Timmer |
This one was an EF-3 when destroyed several homes and damaged other buildings. The tornado was on he ground for 21 minutes and tracked 12.8 miles.
But the dry stats on this tornado don't give nearly the amazing vision of what tornadoes can do. Prominent tornado chaser Reed Timmer incredibly captured the tornado ripping up houses from a drone he launched nearby.
The resulting video from Timmer is absolutely jaw dropping. The best footage is at the beginning as the well-lit tornado pulls roofs from a series of houses in the neighborhood. At one moment, the roofs of three adjacent houses lift off simultaneously. A white snow of insulation fills the air, as does a maelstrom of boards, roofing material and other debris.
Just incredible what a tornado can do, especially when viewed from the air
Crystal Lake/Gary, South Dakota, June 28, 2025
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| The "Dancing Tornado" in Gary, South Dakota last year |
This one in South Dakota last year was a real shapeshifter. It starts out with a classic stovepipe shape. Then in quickly turned into a rope, which is usually a sign a tornado is about to dissipate.
But this time, the rope thicken again. And for the lack of a better description, the ropey tornado danced. Sort of wiggled as it moved across the countryside.
Click this link to view the dancing tornado.
As cool and interesting as this tornado was, it wasn't all fun and games. It was an EF-3 twister, with wind speeds of 155 to 165 mph. It traveled nearly ten miles, damage several properties. A farm house, garage, two machine sheds, a barn and grain bins were completely destroyed. A half ton pickup truck was hurled 300 yards.
South Dakota gets plenty of tornadoes but not many are as strong as the "dancing tornado." Statistics show South Dakota had 1,931 twisters between 1950 and 2024 but only 75 of those were EF-3 or greater.
We're not getting into the heart of tornado season. There's already been plenty of horrifying and wild photos and videos of tornadoes and their aftermaths this year. And unfortunately for the victims of these storms, there's more tornado pictures coming over the next several weeks
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