List of tornadoes causing 100 or more deaths

This is a list of the deadliest tornadoes in world history. This list includes confirmed individual tornadoes that caused 100 or more direct fatalities.

The deadliest tornadoes by far have occurred in a small area of Bangladesh and East India. In this 8000 sqmi area, 24 of the 42 tornadoes which are known to have killed 100 or more people occurred. This is probably due to the high population density and poor economic status of the area, as well as a lack of early warning system.

Most of the rest occurred in the United States in 1953 or earlier, before tornado prediction efforts began. The only tornado on this list to occur during the 21st century is the Joplin tornado, which occurred on May 22, 2011.

Uncertainty
There are many sources of uncertainty in the statistics mentioned on this page. Before the 20th century, and even until recently in third-world countries, records-keeping was spotty at best. Before the American Civil War, slave deaths were often not included in tornado death tolls. Fatalities of Africans in the Southern US were routinely not counted through the 1940s and in some cases into the 1950s. Most tornadoes from many decades ago had no official government report on damage or casualties, so statistics must be compiled from local newspapers, which are not always a reliable, consistent, or comprehensive source. Many death tolls were published with people still missing, or with people critically injured and likely to die later. News media, Red Cross, and other counts don't necessarily distinguish whether a death was directly caused by a tornado and can include deaths during cleanup efforts. Routine counting of fatalities began in the US in the 1950s. In Bangladesh and India, exact populations of towns were often not known, so most death figures are approximate. Individual tornado descriptions go into more detail on these uncertainties. Officials in some areas, for example in Russia (and the USSR) and parts of Europe, until recent years denied that tornadoes occur in those areas thus fatalities may not be counted as tornadic.

There is also meteorological uncertainty with the nature of many tornadoes on this list. Before the 1970s, and even now outside of North America, most tornado paths were not thoroughly surveyed to ensure that the storm was indeed a single tornado and not a series of tornadoes from the same storm (a tornado family). Often a single supercell can produce a new tornado soon after or even before the demise of an old tornado, giving the appearance to many observers that a single tornado has caused all the damage. On this list, if it is likely that the tornado was in fact two or more tornadoes, it will appear in italics.

Tornadoes
Notes
 * †May have been higher.
 * Most injury figures are approximate