ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE TERM “DERECHO ” AS A SEVERE WEATHER EVENT

The severe weather term derecho represents widespread straight-line damaging winds associated with lines of thunderstorms. Some people have asked me how the term derecho entered the meteorological community. And recently, Ray Wolf, the Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Quad Cities, IA/IL, asked me to write a story about the origin and evolution of the term as a meteorological event. So, I have written the following story. The origin of derecho as a meteorological term appears to be associated with a conflict concerning the nature of damaging winds associated with convective storms. John P. Finley, an officer in the United States Army Signal Corps, became interested in severe convective storms in the late 1870s, and he began devoting all of his spare private time to the study of tornadoes in the United States (Galway 1984, 1985a, 1985b). According to Galway (1984), by the early 1880s, the Signal Corps was supporting Finley’s tornado work and he began the “Tornado Studies ” project. A part of this project was establishing a network o