Meteorologists and storm chasers have been watching closely, but in the past week the United States has not experienced a confirmed derecho or a comparably organized, long‑lived, and destructive windstorm of that type. The atmosphere has been active, but mainly with winter systems and flooding rains rather than the classic warm‑season, bow‑echo squall lines that produce derechos.
According to the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center’s recent outlooks and mesoscale discussions, the primary severe weather focus over the last several days has been scattered strong thunderstorms with localized damaging gusts, not the continuous swath of wind damage over hundreds of miles that defines a derecho. Their storm reports map shows pockets of 50–70 mile‑per‑hour wind gusts tied to individual thunderstorms and frontal passages, but no single corridor of damage that would meet the usual criteria: at least about 400 miles of mostly continuous severe wind reports, with several gusts over 75 miles per hour and clear evidence of a single, long‑lived convective system driving it.
Instead, much of the high‑impact wind has been driven by strong cold fronts and Alberta clippers. DTN’s Ag Weather Forum describes a vigorous clipper that raced from the northern Plains into the Great Lakes around December 9–10, dropping a stripe of 4 to 8 inches of snow and producing non‑thunderstorm wind gusts over 60 miles per hour across the Dakotas, southwest Minnesota, and eastern Nebraska, with 30–40 mile‑per‑hour winds persisting into the Midwest. That is classic gradient wind on the back side of a deep low, not a derecho: the power lines and trees come down just the same, but the cause is synoptic‑scale wind, not an organized squall line of thunderstorms.
Farther west, regional outlets and hydrologists have been focused on an intense atmospheric river slamming into the Pacific Northwest, with warm, moisture‑laden air unleashing catastrophic flooding in several river basins. Local emergency managers have issued “go now” evacuation orders in multiple towns as rivers have pushed into major or record flood stage. Again, some of the strongest winds there are associated with the low‑pressure system and coastal jet rather than a bowing line of inland thunderstorms. Listeners may hear the word “storm” and think “derecho,” but this is a different animal: heavy orographic rain, landslides, road washouts, and levee concerns dominate the impacts.
If you scroll social media, you will see viral videos of semis tipping in crosswinds on Midwestern interstates, power flashes in the night sky, and sheets of rain blowing sideways through small towns. Those clips often lack context and are quickly labeled “derecho” by non‑meteorologists. Forecasters, however, are careful: they look at radar loops to see if the storms form a coherent bow echo, at surface observations to trace a nearly unbroken path of damaging winds, and at the system’s longevity over many hours and states. None of the recent events in the past seven days in the U.S. clears that bar.
For listeners, the takeaway is that even without a textbook derecho, the pattern can still be dangerous. Arctic air plunging south behind those clippers is driving wind chills well below zero in the northern Plains and Upper Midwest, and high‑profile vehicles are at risk in open country whenever gusts climb past 50 or 60 miles per hour. The Pacific Northwest’s atmospheric river is a reminder that wind and water together can be just as deadly as the straight‑line wind corridors that usually grab the headlines in summer.
As always, the best move for anyone in these regions is to follow local National Weather Service offices, trusted TV meteorologists, and emergency management channels for the latest warnings and impact‑based alerts; they will be the first to flag it if a developing squall line starts to take on the structure and endurance of a true derecho.
Thank you for tuning in, and come back next week for more. This has been a Quiet Please production, and for more from me check out Quiet Please dot A I.
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