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Daily Bread for 7.14.26: Tornado Alley Moves Toward the Midwest

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 95. Sunrise is 5:29 and sunset is 8:32 for 15 hours 3 minutes of daylight. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Innovation Center Advisory Panel meets at 8:30 AM and the Public Works Committee at 5 PM.

On this day in 1789, French revolutionaries storm the Bastille.


We’re closer to Tornado Alley than we once were as that traditional area for storms shifts toward the Midwest:

The U.S. has had a busy tornado season so far, and the majority of the storms are blasting through the Midwest, east of what’s traditionally thought of as Tornado Alley.

Wisconsin has seen a higher than average number of tornadoes so far this year, according to data from the National Weather Service.

“It’s been an active tornado year so far across Wisconsin with 39 documented tornadoes, which ties it with (2025) for the sixth most in an entire year since 1950,” the NWS wrote in an update released Monday.

The NWS says the average number of tornadoes for Wisconsin in a calendar year is 23. In recent years, the state has seen tornado totals around double that number.

Historically, tornadoes have most frequently touched down in the Great Plains, hitting states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, but research has found since 1979 that pattern has been shifting.

“Tornadoes have been happening with less frequency in the Great Plains over the last 40 years,” said Victor Gensini, a professor and director at Northern Illinois University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms. “And they’ve been having greater frequency in places like Illinois and Indiana and Tennessee and portions of the Mid-South and the Midwest.”

See Abigail Bottar, Tornadoes are breaking records in Midwest states as Tornado Alley moves east (With 39 tornadoes so far this year, Wisconsin has already matched last year’s total of tornadoes), Wisconsin Public Radio, July 14, 2026.

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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.


Astronomers find evidence of sugar in the space between stars:

The space between stars in the Milky Way just got a little sweeter for Spanish researchers who’ve found evidence of a sugar which is found in raspberries and self-tanning lotions. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in interstellar space, or the space between stars.

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