Why no tornado warnings were issued by the NWS Wednesday

A tornado warning gets issued when either radar indicates rotation or a trained spotter reports a funnel cloud or tornado. Neither of these happened. Often times in wind driven storms a quick spin up can happen so fast that it's not picked up on radar. If you look at the path length of both tornadoes, they were on the ground less than one minute.

We often see these types of tornadoes in the Miami Valley. Southwest Ohio doesn't typically get large supercell storms that produce large, long lived tornadoes, but more often a brief spin up from a wind driven storm. That is why we always tell our viewers to take severe thunderstorm warnings seriously and seek shelter immediately.

It's also important to note that many of the damage reports from Wednesday's storms came from straight line winds. Winds that likely reached up to 70mph in spots.