Derecho? Sounds like a tornado to me!

[DisneyFreak23]

Ok, so i live in north illinois along the Mississippi River. Yesterday morning at about 6:00 , a huge thunderstorm/windstorm swept through our area. When it was over (which was about 5 mins..)Trees were down EVERYWHERE. some were uprooted, others look like the whole top of the tree was just gone. There used to be a great big maple tree in between our house and out neighbors, but the storm took it and now i just looks like the tree exploded! The limbs were all over her yard. She even ended up having 3 holes in her roof. Apparently, they recorded wind speeds up to 96 mph. That is almost a category 2 hurrican speeds. Our power is out and could be gone for up to 72 hours. We are currently staying at my granfathers house, since he lives across the river and has power. On the news they called the storm a derecho. Has anyone even heard of this? could someone explain what it is/means??

It was pretty scary though, walking around our block and seeing all of the trees, well, what used to be trees.....

[dnickels]

It basically just means that it was a straight line wind, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho not a spinning type wind like a tornado.

I experienced the same thing living back in Michigan one spring when I was younger, we had a huge storm come through that knocked down a lot of trees, barns, stuff like that, and even left a fairly narrow trail over about a mile long path that would make you think it was a tornado. The folks that assess this type of damage have quite a bit of experience telling the difference so it was almost certainly just derecho winds.

[Strmchsr]

It basically just means that it was a straight line wind

Well, sort of. A derecho is a widespread, long-lived windstorm which contains straight line winds rather than rotating winds. A simple straight line wind event can occur with any thunderstorm when there is a sudden downburst. With a derecho it covers hundreds of miles with multiple downbursts. Tornadoes can also occasionally form out of a derecho event. You can usually spot a derecho on radar because it produces a "bow echo" in the squall line. This is when you see part of the line bowed out in front of the rest of the storm system. Sometimes you can have multiple bows as part of the derecho. In order for winds to qualify as a derecho they have to be a minimum of 57 mph, though the record strength recorded has been 115 mph.

As dnickels noted, those of us who have been trained to evaluated these events can tell pretty quick when it's a tornado or a straight line/derecho event. They have very different signatures.

[PAYROLL PRINCESS]

I wonder if that was went through Maynard & Stow, MA a few weeks ago? They had a lot of trees down too. It wasn't as intense in the surrounding towns but we had torrential rains and wind and hail. I was working in the Mall that night and thought it was a tornado going through because all of a sudden my coworker and I were both saying "what is that"? I even made a guy out in the mall itself move under the walkway in case the glass ceiling exploded. Luckily it didn't but it was like nothing I've ever heard in my 12 years in the Mall.