Wisconsin winter: Summer-like conditions with record temperatures lead to first tornadoes

Family members and friends gather at the Rock County home of Marilyn Kueng after the property was damaged in a tornado the previous day. Photo / AP

The first tornadoes ever recorded in Wisconsin in the usually frigid month of February have torn through mostly rural areas on a day that broke records for warmth, setting up the perfect scenario for the type of severe weather normally seen in the late spring and summer.

The storms left a swathe of destruction that included dead and missing cows. Roofs were blown off homes, storage sheds and barns destroyed, vehicles trashed and windows shattered.

At least two tornadoes were confirmed south of Madison and the US National Weather Service was investigating reports of several more spawned from storms that swept across the southeastern part of the state around 5.30pm on Thursday, local time, said meteorologist Taylor Patterson.

One confirmed tornado near Evansville was a “high end” F2, the weather service said. Those tornadoes are described as “significant,” with winds in this particular twister topping out at 220km/h. It was on the ground for 36 minutes, travelling 39.4 kilometres with a maximum width of 457.2 metres.

Another tornado that touched down near Juda was an F1 with peak winds of 177km/h. It was on the ground for 14 minutes, covering 13.4km with a maximum width of 45.7m, the weather service said.

A funnel cloud is seen in the sky over Evansville, Wisconsin. Photo / AP

There were no reports of significant injuries. Local emergency management officials reported dozens of buildings, power lines and other structures that were damaged in the path of the storm that formed in eastern Iowa and died out near Milwaukee. The temperature was a record high for the date: 15C.

Connie Arndt, 72, stood in disbelief on Friday among the debris of a rental house she owned outside Evansville.

“All of us are in denial that this is February,” she said. “It’s an absolute shock.”

Matt Artis, 34, said he had just got out of the shower in his family’s farmhouse in the town of Porter on Thursday evening when he heard a “big bang”. He got his mother and their dog Dixie into the bathroom just as the tornado hit. He said he emerged from the bathroom, looked up and saw nothing but the night sky. The tornado had torn the roof from their home.

Outside, the tornado had turned the farm’s 103-year-old barn to rubble and strewn debris across the fields for hundreds of yards. He said that he found one his cows dead in the barn on Friday morning and 10 more were missing.

Artis appeared to be in shock, wandering around the farm as a small army of neighbours pulled up offering to help him find his cattle. At one point, he threw up his hands and walked away, saying: “I don’t know.”

Family members and friends gather at the Rock County, Wisconsin home of Marilyn Kueng. Photo / AP

Hunter Oller of Brodhead, Wisconsin, and his friend were out fishing when the storm rolled in. They started to drive home but pulled over in the town of Magnolia where they spotted two partially formed tornadoes and one tornado that seemed to touch the ground. Oller, 20, pulled out his cellphone.

“I was in awe,” Oller said.

Patterson, the meteorologist, said the storm was like ones typically seen in Wisconsin in the late spring and summer.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that between 1998 and 2022, 31 states across a broad swathe of the country, from Washington state in the northwest to New Mexico in the south, Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest over to Maine in the northeast, didn’t report a single tornado.

Winter tornadoes are almost unheard of, especially in northern states.

But winter tornadoes - like the one in Wisconsin - are likely to be stronger and stay on the ground longer with a wider swathe of destruction in a warming world, a 2021 study showed. That comes after a 2018 study found that tornadoes were moving farther east, into states like Wisconsin.

The stronger El Nino this year does make it warmer than normal, but it’s hard to say from this one event how significant a role climate change played, the meteorologist Patterson said.

“But with a lot of things that have been going on with climate change, you get more severe events and then you get more impactful severe events,” she said.

Tornadoes are most common in Wisconsin over the northern summer months, between May and August. Since 1948, between November and February, fewer than a dozen tornadoes in total had been reported before Thursday, according to the weather service.

Conditions collided in Wisconsin late afternoon on Thursday, creating the perfect conditions for tornadoes to form, Patterson said. That included rapidly warming temperatures that topped out at a record-tying 13C in Madison and more moisture with rapidly rising air, creating thunderstorms, Patterson said.

Weather service teams will determine how strong the tornadoes were and how many formed. Photos and video shot near Evansville that were posted on social media show a tornado with lightning flashing around it.

Dan Wagner, 76, and his 40-year-old son Andy couldn’t make it to the basement before the tornado hit their house near the Artis farm.

Andy Wagner said he curled into a ball and hoped for the best as windows shattered and the sound of metal on metal filled their home.

“It was like the house took a deep breath, and [then] the windows all exploded. I’m in the foetal position on the floor,” he said. “I thought I was going to die.”