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‘Tornado-like’ windstorm sparks panic in Tamil Nadu; India Met says not a tornado
Rare weather event happened due to east-west trough 3 kms above Tamil Nadu sea. "Tornadoes are far more intense, move rapidly and can cause significant structural damage," says IMD
- PUBLISHED: Mon 22 Jun 2026, 2:29 PM UPDATED: Mon 22 Jun 2026, 2:39 PM
A massive ‘Tornado-like’ windstorm struck Thoothkudi district in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu on Sunday evening, wreaking havoc and causing panic among the people, as sheets blew off roofs and the falling fragments hurting half a dozen people at a theme park. While some claimed it was a tornado, officials at the India Meteorological Department (IMD) denied it.
“Tornadoes are far more intense, move rapidly and can cause significant structural damage,” V.R. Durai, director, Area Cyclone Warning Centre of the IMD, told reporters. “They need a much stronger atmospheric setup.” The rare weather event happened because of an east-west trough stretching for more than three km above the Tamil Nadu sea level.
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“The observed funnel-like feature was most likely associated with the strong updraft beneath a cumulonimbus cloud, which lifted dust and created a rotating or vertically stretched column of air,” pointed out Durai. It was possibly a “localised convective vortex, dust whirl, or transient funnel cloud.”
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One weather blogger who shared the footage said it was a rare event and had happened over the past decade in the district and even in Chennai and the Marina beach. Others said it appeared to be a ‘landspout’, an upside-down tornado, which is weaker and has a shorter span.
Recent tornadoes in India
A study by the IMD on ‘Climatology of Tornadoes’ noted that there were reports of 12 tornadoes in India in recent years (1975 to 2010). Historical data indicates around 50 tornadoes since the 19th century in eastern states.
One of the worst tornadoes to have the country of late was on April 10, 1978, when a village in Keonjhar district in Odisha was struck by a tornado, destroying it completely. More than 150 persons were killed. Twenty years later, another tornado struck the eastern state of West Bengal, killing 160 people. A majority of tornadoes in India happen during the March-May summer months.
On March 18, 1978, just a month before the Odisha disaster, a tornado struck Delhi, killing nearly 30 people and injuring 700.
Indian-American author Amitav Ghosh, who was then a student of Anthropology at Delhi University, experienced the tornado. In The Great Derangement, his 2016 book on climate change, Ghosh wrote: “Glancing over my shoulder I saw a grey, tube-like extrusion forming on the underside of a dark cloud: it grew rapidly as I watched, and then all of a sudden it turned and came whiplashing down to earth, heading in my direction.”
He saw lamp posts, bicycles, laboratory equipment and an entire tea stall being snatched by the tornado. But it disappeared suddenly. “This was, in effect, the first tornado to hit Delhi — and indeed the entire region — in recorded meteorological history,” he wrote.
In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power, added the famous author.
