July 6-7 Lake Superior Tornado Outbreak

The Lake Superior Tornado Outbreak of July 6-7 2019 was without a doubt the most destructive severe weather event the Lake Superior area had ever seen. The first tornado touched down over Lake Superior as a mesocylonic waterspout at 11:50pm July and the final tornado lifted off of Drummond Island MI at 10:48pm July 8. In total, 71 tornadoes touched down in North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ontario. The strongest of which was an EF5 wedge that tore a mile wide, 22 mile long path through the rural countryside northeast of Escanaba, MI. In total, there were 372 casualties, 1,017 injuries, and 31 missing persons. One of the main factors that led to a high amount of deaths was the inexperience of the area residents, of which only a few had ever even seen a tornado. Also factors include remoteness of the area, lack of storm shelters, and a lack of storm spotters reporting to the NWS. The meteorological setup was a slow moving dryline combined with remarkable instability. A mild spring had warmed lake temperatures of Lake Superior and Lake Michigan to the point that the lakes no longer provided the security of supercell killing lake breezes, but now provided lake breezes that did little to halt storm development, and instead provided a source of rotation for the storms. This made storms along the dryline to rotate, and storms forming ahead of the dryline rotate as well. This created a prolonged period of risk for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is located in between the two lake breezes.