NWS St. Louis has revised its May 16, 2025 tornado damage assessment after a year-long review of new ground survey data and aerial imagery, adding more than 10,000 damage points to the storm track. The update gives the tornado map a much more complete picture of what hit the St. Louis area that day.
The review shows two tornadoes struck the metropolitan area. The stronger one, rated EF-3, tracked through St. Louis County, St. Louis City and far-western Madison County, Illinois, before dissipating outside Granite City. The second tornado, rated EF-1, packed maximum winds of 107 mph as it moved through western Madison County and dissipated just east of SIU Edwardsville.
The revised measurements also sharpen the scale of the storm. NWS St. Louis said the EF-3 tornado’s width was increased to 3,168 yards, or 1.8 miles, making it the widest tornado in the region since 1950, when reliable records began. Including non-tornadic wind south and east of the path, the swath of damage exceeds 2 miles. The EF-1 tornado had a path width of 525 yards, or 0.3 miles.
That kind of adjustment matters because tornado damage surveys are not static documents. The updated dataset, built from new ground survey data and high-resolution aerial imagery, allowed forecasters to draw a far more comprehensive picture of the May 16 outbreak. Timely and accurate tornado assessments are among the National Weather Service’s highest priorities, and the revised assessment is available in the NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit, where it can be viewed, interacted with and downloaded.
For St. Louis, the new review does more than redraw lines on a map. It sets the record straight on how broad and destructive the storm was, and it leaves no doubt that the EF-3 tornado was the dominant event in a day that also produced a separate EF-1 track across western Madison County.
