(Radio Iowa) – More severe weather stormed across Iowa on Tuesday night, bringing high winds, heavy rain and large hail. National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Lee says there were perhaps 30 sightings of funnel clouds statewide and a few of them touched down to become tornadoes. “Preliminarily, we think there may have been three, and they were pretty weak funnels that just briefly touched down and didn’t really produce any damage,” Lee says, “so it’s kind of hard to tell how many there were because most of them didn’t really damage anything.”
Tornadoes were reported near Cumming, Van Meter, Lambs Grove, Patterson and Ely — with reports of funnel clouds stretching from Charter Oak in western Iowa all the way to the Cedar Rapids area in the east. Lee says the active nighttime weather pattern followed a very hot, humid day. “We had a lot of instability and a kind of boundary laying across roughly the I-80 corridor across the state,” Lee says. “It was able to spin up those little funnels but thankfully, most of them didn’t touch down and weren’t of any particular severity, so it was a spectacular sight but not one that did a lot of damage, thankfully.”
While there was no damage reported from tornadoes in this series of storms, Lee says there -was- damage from other elements. “The largest hail stone that we had reported fell near Winterset and that was about roughly baseball-sized,” Lee says. “We also had some strong winds, particularly out close to Omaha, that were measured wind gusts up around 90 miles an hour with some damage, so it was a night for severe weather across at least the southern half of the state.”
Storm damage Tuesday night (6/25) west of the Tri-Center High Schoo by about 2 miles or so. Winds gusted up to 60 mph. (Photos courtesy Zach Ploen)
The typical tornado season in Iowa runs April, May and June, and the state’s seen an above-average number of twisters this year. “It doesn’t really end in June. It just gradually tapers off,” Lee says. “We can get tornadoes in any month of the year and they’re most likely in May and June, but they still occur fairly regularly in the other summer months as well. We have a long way to go, particularly in an active year like this one.”
Prior to last night’s (Tuesday night’s) storms, the National Weather Service reported Iowa had 86 tornadoes so far this year, with 44 in April and 42 during May. The average in a year is about 50. In 2021, Iowa had a record 63 tornadoes in a single day — in December. That was during the state’s second derecho in as many years, and that December outbreak set another record for most EF-2 tornadoes in one day — at 21. Iowa’s worst-ever day for deadly tornadoes was May 15th of 1968, when the state saw five massive F-5 tornadoes that killed 18 people.
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