How Indiana's number of tornadoes stack up against 'Tornado Alley' so far this year

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- When we talk about severe weather there is usually the idea of “Tornado Alley”, but in practice, especially in recent years, this idea doesn’t really hold up.

Tornado Alley usually consists of the states between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Nebraska, traditionally Great Plains states.

But there has seemingly been a shift of where severe weather is happening. One of the ways we can tell this is by looking at the tornado reports in each state so far this year.

Indiana has seen 43 separate tornado reports, more than Oklahoma and Texas combined, 14 and 25 respectively. Now of course Indiana doesn’t have the highest amount of tornado reports this year, Mississippi has seen 110 reports since January.

As we get further into severe weather season, we are definitely expecting Oklahoma and Texas to start lapping us, but at the moment, we've seen more tornadic activity than them combined.

On Monday evening the Northern Indiana National Weather Service office released a statement that said that another tornado had been identified in Michiana from Sunday’s storms.

I’m talking about last Sunday's storms, the first round of severe weather we saw last week. So why did it take them so long to identify this second tornado?

First it was a weaker tornado, wind speeds up to 90 mph, damage could have looked like a straight-line wind event on the ground.

However, either over the weekend or sometime last week additional drone footage and updated damage photos were sent into the NWS, which gave them confirmation that the damage created a path.

This tornado brings the total in Michiana from the Sunday storm up to five, two of which were in Cass County.