National Weather Service Confirms Tornado Near Escanaba

CLICK TO HEAR JACK HALL’S INTERVIEW WITH MATT ZIKA, NWS

The National Weather Service confirms that a small EF-1 tornado touched down west of Escanaba Monday evening, causing damage to a storage facility and knocking out power to people living in the Hyde area.

Warning coordination meteorologist Matt Zika at the Marquette office says there were no watches or warnings in effect when the tornado quickly developed and briefly touched down along US-2 about three miles west of Escanaba at 5:40 p.m.

“It was a surprise for many, and it caught us weather folks a little by surprise,” Zika said. “We weren’t predetermined to have a significant severe weather type of day. It was very quick spin-up, short-lived tornado.”

“There were several very unique circumstances that set up yesterday. Number one, the storm that developed that produced the tornado actually technically wasn’t called a thunderstorm because there was no lightning in it. The tops of the clouds were way lower to the ground than what we’re used to seeing with thunderstorms that do produce tornadoes. However, there was enough wind energy, or changing of wind direction with height in the atmosphere. It was enough to cause enough rotation to spin up a very brief tornado.”

Zika says they used a combination of social media videos from people who were traveling on US-2, and photos from the damage on the ground, to make the confirmation.

“We could see rotating wall cloud, and the funnel just starting to come down there right around the US-2 area where the initial touchdown was,” Zika said. “In addition, we’ve had some video from drone footage flown over the path of the tornado, where we could see the damage and you could see the trees laying in the direction that definitely confirms that it was a tornado.”

He says it was the third tornado to pop up this summer in the Upper Peninsula, with the other two reported in Iron County on August 9.

The tornado had estimated winds of 95 miles per hour, which puts it as an EF-1, the weakest on the Fujita-Pearson scale of 0 to 5. The path for it being on the ground was about a half-mile, which he says is “very brief and short-lived”.

(Photos courtesy of Delta County Sheriff’s Department)