Anyone who's lived in Texas, or in the vicinity or Tornado Alley, knows how powerful & deadly a twister can be. Among the 50 states, Texas has one of the highest number of tornadoes annually, with over 130 tornadoes A YEAR. As of right now, the Lone Star State are currently #1 in the state with the most tornadoes: over 8,000 occurring since the 1950s.

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But does that affect the states NEXT to Texas? New Mexico & Arizona?

One would think that because they're so next to Texas, they might experience a lot of tornadoes. So let's look at each state to see how many tornadoes they get. Starting with the Land of Enchantment: New Mexico.

New Mexico State Flag
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New Mexico Tornadoes

According to the National Weather Service, the amount of tornadoes that have ever hit New Mexico, don't even hit the thousand mark: only about 683 have been recorded since 1883. The deadliest tornado happened on March 23rd, 2007: 2 people were killed & 23 people were injured in Southeast New Mexico, between. The tornado was classified as an EF2 tornado.

Arizona Tornadoes

Arizona is not a state that experiences tornadoes very often; but it DOES happen. The most recent tornado activity the state experienced was the 2010 Outbreak they had in October: 12 tornadoes occurred between October 5th & 6th resulting $4.9 billion dollars worth of damage.

Aside from this freak outbreak, usually a tornado occurring in Arizona is rare: only about 4 a year rare. In fact one YouTuber, Swegle Studios, did a video showing just how many tornadoes have occurred in each state & ranked each state based on tornado activity. He was able to find out that Arizona has had a total of less than 300 tornadoes occur statewide.

So based on this information: you're more likely to see a tornado occur in New Mexico rather than Arizona. The states don't rank in the top 10 states with the fewest tornadoes, but the numbers in both states are fairly low. So you can breathe a sigh of relief: you're very unlikely to see a very powerful tornado in either state.

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