Storm Update: 90 MPH Winds and a Downed Cherry Branch
The first sign that this was not going to be an ordinary June afternoon was my phone going off with that sound you cannot ignore. Not a text, not a missed call, but the Wireless Emergency Alert tone, the one engineered to make you stop whatever you are doing and look down. The message was blunt. A Severe Thunderstorm Warning for “DESTRUCTIVE 90 mph winds,” take shelter in a sturdy building, away from windows, flying debris may be deadly to those caught without shelter. You read a sentence like that twice.
Ninety miles an hour is hurricane territory. We do not get hurricanes in Wisconsin, but we do get the straight-line winds that come barreling off the leading edge of a big summer thunderstorm, and those can do the same kind of damage in a much shorter window. I pulled up the radar, and there it was: a solid line of red and orange marching across the Fox Valley, right over Neenah, headed for Lake Michigan. When the radar looks like that, you stop second-guessing the alert.
The storm itself was short, and that is the part that always surprises people who did not grow up here. The worst of it lasted only a few minutes. But those few minutes were genuinely intense, the kind where the trees bend in a way that makes you do quiet math on how old they are and how close they stand to the house. Then it passed, the sky went back to a flat gray, and it was over almost as fast as it started.
When I went out to survey the yard, the damage was mostly minor, which I will gladly take. The willow lost a few branches, which is what willows do. They are fast-growing and a little brittle, and a willow that has never dropped a branch in a windstorm is a willow that has not lived. I will clean those up, and the tree will not even notice.
The one that actually stung was the Montmorency cherry. The storm took down a good-sized branch, and it was loaded with cherries that were still green and growing, a few weeks out from being ready. That is the frustrating kind of loss. Not because the branch itself matters much, but because of the whole season of work the tree had already poured into that fruit. So it goes. The tree will be fine, and there are plenty of cherries left on the rest of it.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to, though. These storms feel more intense than they used to. That is exactly the sort of statement that is easy to wave off, because every generation is convinced the weather was milder when they were kids, and I try to stay skeptical of my own memory. But this is one case where the data backs up the feeling, at least in part, and it is worth understanding why.
The cleanest, least-arguable piece of it is basic physics. Warmer air holds more water vapor, roughly 7 percent more for every degree Celsius of warming. That is not a model or a projection. It is a measured property of air that has been understood for well over a century (it even has a name, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation). More water vapor means more moisture available to fall as rain, and it also means more energy stored in the atmosphere for a storm to tap into. You are essentially loading the system with more fuel.
What the data actually shows, from the National Climate Assessment and other long-term records, is that the heaviest downpours have gotten heavier and more frequent across the Midwest over the past several decades. That part is well documented. Where I think it pays to be honest is the rest of it. Tying any single storm, or one 90 mph wind reading, directly to climate change is genuinely hard, and the trend in damaging winds and hail is far less certain than the trend in heavy rain. The fair way to put it is that a warmer atmosphere is loading the dice toward more energetic storms, even if you cannot point at one roll and say “that one was climate change.” That is a more careful claim than you usually hear, and I think it is the accurate one.
None of this changes what I am doing tomorrow, which is dragging a cherry branch to the brush pile and being grateful the damage stopped where it did. But it does change how I read that alert on my phone. When the National Weather Service reaches for a word like “destructive,” they are not being dramatic for the sake of it. Ninety miles an hour is worth taking seriously. We took shelter, the house is fine, and the yard will recover. Not a bad outcome for an afternoon that started with my phone screaming at me.
