A line of powerful thunderstorms, dubbed a derecho by the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), barreled across parts of the northern tier of the United States on Tuesday, leaving thousands without power, causing extensive damage and leaving at least four injured.
In total, the SPC received 255 reports of damaging winds and hail, most of which came from the derecho in South Dakota and Iowa. A derecho is a storm complex that causes damage continuously or intermittently for 400 miles or more along a 60-mile-wide-or-more swath, according to the Storm Prediction Center (SPC).
Derechos have caused extreme damage in the U.S. A recent notable example is a derecho that caused widespread destruction across Iowa in August 2020, decimating fields of crops with wind gusts up to 140 mph.
The damaging wind gusts from Tuesday's derecho took down powerlines across the Midwest and as of Wednesday morning, over 36,000 customers were still without power in Indiana and Ohio, according to PowerOutage.US.
The top wind gusts were reported northwest of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in a town called Howard, when a 99-mph wind gust was observed. According to a South Dakota Department of Transportation roadway weather information sensor, wind gusts of 70 mph or higher were sustained for roughly 20 to 30 minutes.
In northern Iowa, a storm chaser captured the moment the winds blew a semi-truck off the road. In the video shared by KCCI, a local television station, the semi-truck can be seen blowing down the road before coming to a stop, jack-knifed on the left side of the road.
According to the journal Science, the U.S. Corn Belt, one of the most extremely fertile regions on Earth, is located in the Great Plains. More than 10 million bushels of corn are produced there every year. When damaging storms plow through the area, there can be significant damage to the crops grown in this region.
According to a video on social media, the winds from Tuesday night's storm flattened cornfields across South Dakota.
As the storms approached Sioux Falls, the sky became engrossed in a greenish hue amid reports of strong winds and hail. More than 3 inches of rain fell on portions of Sioux Falls during the storms....
