05/24/2026
We often have to remind viewers during our briefings and severe weather coverage that straight line winds can often be more impactful over a tornado. We saw this most recently on May 18th, 2026. Hear us out, and read on.
In the thick of it all, we have always been taught that those big scary noodles from the sky are often the worst type of thing you can get during a severe weather event, and if you get a bunch of them at once, absolutely, but here in Michigan, we deal with what many call, the b-list hazards, especially more often than not. To us, that would be hail and damaging winds, with emphasis today on the damaging wind aspect.
To keep things somewhat brief, severe winds associated with thunderstorms start at 60 mph. During severe weather events, damaging winds can produce localized, or widespread tree and powerline damage in a swath as little as a mile wide (sometimes skinnier), all the way up to 250 miles wide. Additionally, the wind field (shown in the graphic) can also have some depth where winds last for 10-15 minutes at a time. Tornadoes have the same destructive nature, and while tornadoes often produce wind speeds that greatly surpass what you see during damaging wind events, most tornadoes in Michigan are under a mile wide, with some accompanying straight line winds in these tornadic supercells gusting out a few miles from the center of the circulation. Unless a tornado parks itself on your house, tornadoes also typically last 15-90 seconds on average. When it's consistently 60, 70, 80 mph+ across a large swath for an unknown amount of time, damaging winds are by far more of a hazard to the entire population.
Still, no matter the hazard, whenever you're under a severe threat for the day, always have your severe weather shelter stocked and ready to enter when warnings are issued. Below we drew examples of what the wind fields look like during a damaging wind event (left), and what they look like in a supercellular thunderstorm producing a tornado (right), with the key of each color included. Arrows denote motion.
