An active spring brought dozens of tornadoes to Northeast Arkansas, making many residents ask a question they’ve asked before: Is Tornado Alley shifting east?

The question comes back up almost every time the region has a severe tornado season, but some meteorologists and scientists say the question is more complicated than just a yes or a no.

According to Ecoflow, Tornado Alley used to span from Nebraska to Kansas, with portions of Oklahoma and Texas also included. Today, EcoFlow says the alley is shifting to the Southeast.

KAIT Meteorologist Micah Stevens spent his fall diving into the data from 2025 weather patterns in Northeast Arkansas, and he thinks it may just be a recency bias.

“Whenever you don’t go through a tornadic event when you don’t have a spring like we saw during the spring of 2025, you can get kind of complacent. You can be like, oh, it’s not happening to me, so you may tend to think that it’s not something that happens around here all that often,” Stevens said. “But in the spring of 2025, we saw dozens of tornadoes, over 60 total tornadoes in the state of Arkansas, and they all happened in the spring, so a lot of people naturally were like, OK, tornado alley, it’s shifting.”

Jonesboro resident Matt Sheets has lived on the same plot of land his whole life, and despite the severe weather they see in Northeast Arkansas, he has never experienced severe damage.

Because of that, Sheets believes the weather pattern can go back and forth, sometimes severe, and sometimes tame. “I think it’s a pendulum just like. It’s the same as the way I see the temperature and the global warming concerns,” Sheets said.

A study by IOP Science states that stronger tornadoes have been happening more frequently in the Southeast over the past 31 years compared to previous studies.

Sheets isn’t fully convinced it’s shifting due to repeated impacts in similar locations.

“They say, ‘Well, the alley is shifting.’ Well, they hit the same spot. There’s one church down the road from us that’s been blown away four times,” Sheets said.

In the spring of 2025, Northeast Arkansas saw multiple EF-4 tornadoes, along with EF-3s and EF-2s that spread all across the region. Stevens said that, along with that, came an unforeseen impact: flooding.

“Just a wide variety of different storm intensities, but also just varieties when it comes to the impacts that we felt with the flooding,” Stevens said. “Which was kind of a secondary impact in a way, but it became the primary impact after the tornadoes moved through, and the flooding was probably more of the more widespread impacts that we felt all across the area.”

Regardless of your stance on the shift of Tornado Alley, Stevens says it’s best to stay prepared for anything. “Having an emergency kit, being ready to go take that in your basement, having extra food storage, having a tornado shelter, all of those things,” Stevens said.

An all-important message: severe weather doesn’t have to happen every day or even every year to be dangerous, and preparation can make the difference between life and death.