Every recorded tornado in Craighead County, 1955 to 2025

This page lists every tornado that the National Weather Service has entered for Craighead County in NOAA's Storm Events Database, which reaches back to 1950. We downloaded the raw yearly files from the National Centers for Environmental Information, kept the Arkansas rows coded to Craighead County with the event type "Tornado", and put them in one table. Nothing here was added or rounded: the ratings, path sizes and casualty counts are the ones on file with NOAA. If you want the story behind the three best-known storms, the Jonesboro tornado history page tells it. This page is the ledger.

The record at a glance

• 54 tornado records between March 20, 1955 and May 16, 2025. NOAA's files run through June 2026 at the time we pulled them, and nothing in Craighead had been logged for 2026 yet.
• 651 injuries and 38 deaths in total. Two storms account for almost all of it: the F4 of May 15, 1968 (350 injuries, 34 deaths) and the F4 of May 26, 1973 (257 injuries, 3 deaths).
• Nine rated 3 or higher on the Fujita or Enhanced Fujita scale, three of them since 2020.
• Longest path on file: 36.7 miles, an F2 on March 20, 1955. Widest: 1,800 yards, the EF3 of December 10, 2021.

*2020 through mid-2026, so the decade isn't finished.

Search the table

Tap a column heading to sort by it; tap again to reverse.

How to read the ratings

A tornado's rating is a judgment made after the fact from what it broke, not a wind reading. Records before February 1, 2007 use Ted Fujita's original F scale; everything since uses the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale, which the Storm Prediction Center describes as an update built by meteorologists and wind engineers. The EF version ties each rating to 28 kinds of damage indicator, from farm outbuildings and mobile homes to hardwood trees, and to how badly each one failed. Under the operational EF scale, an EF3 means estimated three-second gusts of 136 to 165 mph and an EF4 166 to 200 mph. The two scales were designed to stay comparable, so this table treats "F3" and "EF3" as the same step, but the wind numbers behind the older letters were estimated differently. NOAA's file format notes say the rating stored is the highest damage found along the path, so one badly hit farm can set the number for miles of lighter damage.

Why the count is "records", not "tornadoes"

NOAA files a tornado once per county it touches. When one crosses a county line, each county gets its own segment with its own length, width, rating and casualty count. That has two effects here. First, the miles column is the length NOAA filed for the Craighead record; for a storm that crossed a county line, that covers only the stretch inside this county. Second, a long-track storm can carry a stronger rating somewhere else. The December 10, 2021 tornado is rated EF3 in this county, with peak winds the survey put at 145 mph and the one death and five injuries at the Monette nursing home; the NWS Memphis narrative filed with it says the same storm strengthened into an EF4 later, in the Missouri Bootheel.

The reverse also happens. On some days the county logged several short, separate tornadoes from one storm system: five on January 21, 1999, four on April 27, 2011, and three on December 24, 1982. Each is its own row.

What the numbers can't tell you

• Early records are thin. Before the mid-1990s, entries usually have no starting town at all, so those rows read "Not recorded". The Storm Prediction Center notes that reports climbed sharply in the 1990s once Doppler radar and trained spotter networks arrived. The jump from the 1980s to the 1990s here probably says as much about counting as about weather.
• Casualties are NOAA's tallies. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas puts the 1968 injury count in Jonesboro near 450; the federal record for Craighead lists 350. We show NOAA's figure and don't try to reconcile them.
• Times are standard time. NOAA stores these in Central Standard Time year-round. The 2020 Jonesboro tornado shows 3:58 p.m. here, which was 4:58 p.m. on the clocks people were reading that day.

Patterns that matter for a shelter

Sort by date and look at the months. April carries the most records (14), then May (8), with March, January and December at 7 apiece and August at 6. Only June and November have none. That is a wider spread than "spring tornado season" suggests, and several of the costliest storms struck after dark: the 1968 F4 began at 9:50 p.m. standard time, the 1973 F4 at 11:15 p.m., and the 2021 EF3 just after 7 p.m. in December, well after sunset.

Then filter for ratings of 3 or stronger. Nine records qualify. The ones with a recorded starting town began near Egypt, Jonesboro, Needham and Davis, and their paths crossed Bay, Lake City and Monette on the way to Delfore and Aetna. Strong tornadoes here have not kept to one corner of the county.

A room built to FEMA P-361 and ICC 500 is designed for 250 mph winds, above the top of the EF4 band, which is the point of building to that standard rather than hoping a closet will hold. Whether that means an in-garage or underground shelter or an above-ground safe room depends on your lot. If you don't have one yet, know where your nearest public tornado shelter is and when it opens.

Source and reuse

Data: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database, bulk "details" files for 1950 through 2026 (file versions dated March to September 2026), downloaded October 22, 2026. Filter: state Arkansas, county Craighead, event type Tornado. Rating definitions from the Storm Prediction Center's EF scale page; field meanings from NCEI's bulk data format notes. NOAA revises records now and then, so for official use, check the database itself. Teachers, local news and neighborhood groups are welcome to link to this page.