Two tornadoes touched down in Michigan on Wednesday, June 5, including the Livonia tornado that killed one young child. Neither tornado had a tornado warning issued. Here the National Weather Service explains why all tornadoes in Michigan can’t have a warning issued during a storm.
On Wednesday, a line of thunderstorms was slowly increasing in strength. The overall line of thunderstorms was just about to start producing low-end severe straightline winds. That is when the Livonia tornado developed at 3:30 p.
m. and lasted only nine minutes. Rich Pollman is the Meteorologist-In-Charge (MIC) at the National Weather Service in Detroit.
He oversees the office that would have issued the tornado warning for the Livonia tornado. Pollman says all tornadoes still can’t be predicted in advance. He said this tornado came together in the matter of a minute.
“This wasn’t a classic supercell thunderstorm that typically produces a tornado. This was what we call a spin-up tornado. In a spin-up, the rotation and touchdown at the ground occur at the same time as the rotation develops in the higher part of the storm,” according to Pollman.
During the bigger, longer-lasting tornadoes, we often see a rotation develop 5,000 to 10,000 feet up in the air before a tornado actually touches the ground and does damage. This is how most of the strong tornadoes have a tornado warning in place several minutes to one-half hour before the tornado. The recent strong EF2 tornado that hit Portland had s.
