A radar-indicated warning for rural southeastern El Paso County, 34 miles from downtown, lasting 24 minutes — and the search spike it produced
No tornado hit Colorado Springs on September 20, 2026. What happened was narrower than the alerts made it feel: at 9:21 PM Mountain time, the National Weather Service office in Pueblo issued a tornado warning for the southeastern corner of El Paso County — the county Colorado Springs sits in — and let it expire on schedule at 9:45 PM. The warned area was open country roughly 34 miles southeast of downtown. No tornado, funnel cloud, or tornado damage was reported anywhere in Colorado that night.
If you got an alert on your phone, searched "tornado warning Colorado Springs," and found nothing that told you what actually happened, this is that page.
The warning exactly as the National Weather Service issued it, outlined in white, over NEXRAD reflectivity at 9:25 PM — mid-warning. The storm core sits inside the polygon; the line runs to downtown Colorado Springs, 34 miles northwest. Zoom and pan to see how much of the county sits outside it. Map by DisasterAWARE; radar NOAA/NWS NEXRAD via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, Iowa State University; basemap Esri.
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The warning polygon's nearest edge was about 34 miles from downtown Colorado Springs; its centre was about 39 miles out. The city was never inside it.
Wireless Emergency Alerts are targeted at the warning polygon, but the cell towers that carry them cover more ground than the polygon does, and a tornado warning for "El Paso County" reads, to most people, as a warning for Colorado Springs. The result on September 20 was a county-shaped alert for a storm that was, by the Weather Service's own description, a rural one.
That gap — between where an alert is felt and where the hazard actually is — is the single most common source of confusion in severe weather, and it is why we draw a hard line between an alert and an observed event everywhere on this site.
The NWS collects Local Storm Reports from spotters, emergency managers, and the public after every severe weather event. For Colorado between midnight September 20 and noon September 21 there were 41 reports — hail near Genoa and Holyoke on the eastern plains, and rainfall totals. Zero tornado or funnel cloud reports. There were no reports at all from El Paso County.
The warning was issued on a radar signature, the storm moved south over open ground, and the signature did not produce a tornado that anyone saw or that damaged anything. That is a normal outcome. Historically, roughly three in four tornado warnings do not verify with a tornado; radar-indicated warnings are issued precisely because waiting for visual confirmation would cost the minutes that matter.
The question behind the search — does Colorado Springs get tornadoes? — has a real answer in our archive. Within 80 km of the city, National Weather Service and Storm Prediction Center records show 22 tornadoes from 2017 through September 2026. The distribution is spiky: seven came in 2023 and four in 2025, no other year had more than four, and 2022 and 2026 so far had none. None was rated above EF1; the closest EF1s to downtown came in July 2023, August 2024 and June 2025, each 20 to 30 km out.
Two honest caveats about that record. It counts tornadoes, not alerts — DisasterAWARE's archive holds 44 tornado alert records for the same radius and years, because one storm can generate several warnings and watches as it moves. And "within 80 km" runs from the city centre to the closest point of each tornado's path: the closest of the 22 came about 20 km from downtown. The pattern is still clear: the Pikes Peak region gets a handful of weak, short-lived tornadoes most summers, most often on the plains north and east of the city.
The Colorado Springs tornado page on explore now carries a "recent activity" section that says all of this in five lines: the warning, its source, its duration, its distance from the city, and its outcome — labelled as an alert, not an event. At the time, the DisasterAWARE platform's live record showed this warning registered as a hazard at 9:27:38 PM — six minutes and thirty-eight seconds after the Weather Service issued it — with the warning polygon attached, and its exposure model put the numbers on what was inside that polygon: about 53 people in 21 households, roughly $24 million of capital, three schools, no hospitals. Those are small figures because the warned area was rural ground southeast of the city, and that is the whole point — "Colorado Springs" in the alert and "Colorado Springs" on the ground were different places. Live alerts within 300 km already appear on every city page and refresh hourly; the recent-activity section is the part that stays after the alert expires, so the next person who searches this event gets the answer instead of a blank map.
That is the shape of thing we think a hazard page should do: show what is happening, then show what happened, and never confuse the two.
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Was there a tornado in Colorado Springs on September 20, 2026? No. The National Weather Service issued one tornado warning that evening, for rural southeastern El Paso County about 34 miles from downtown, based on radar-indicated rotation. It expired after 24 minutes and no tornado or funnel cloud was reported anywhere in Colorado that night.
Why did I get a tornado warning alert in Colorado Springs? Wireless Emergency Alerts go out over cell towers whose coverage is broader than the warning polygon, and the warning named El Paso County. The storm itself stayed over open country southeast of the city, as the warning text stated.
What does "radar indicated" mean on a tornado warning? It means the warning was issued on a rotation signature seen on Doppler radar rather than on a report from a spotter or a sighting. Radar-indicated warnings are issued early on purpose; historically most do not verify with a tornado on the ground.
Does Colorado Springs get tornadoes? Yes, occasionally and usually weakly. Within 80 km of the city, NWS and SPC records show 22 tornadoes from 2017 through September 2026, most often on the plains north and east of it. None was rated above EF1.
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