You may have heard a unique term during severe weather this week.

Iowa got hit with several tornadoes this week, including a deadly one in Greenfield.

Storm chaser Reed Timmer followed it through the fields and got footage that's pretty much straight out of "Twister" as it took out wind turbines.

Strong stuff. So it's no surprise that this is Greenfield as seen today after that twister:

 

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In the Quad Cities metro, we didn't see much in terms of strong storms. Wilton and Muscatine saw nasty stuff.

But we all heard and saw the warning of 'PDS Watch'. It sounds weird, right? Because it's rare. We were already under a Tornado Watch, we get the picture, now what?

It stands for 'particularly dangerous situation'. Andy Ervin with the National Weather Service Quad Cities office, told Des Moines Register that it's used if "there’s an expectation of particularly violent tornadoes possible", including intense winds like in the case of a derecho.

NOAA defines a PDS Watch as this:

The Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) wording is used in rare situations when long-lived, strong and violent tornadoes are possible. This enhanced wording may also accompany severe thunderstorm watches for intense convective wind storms.

The PDS Watch wasn't the wrong call this week, we definitely did see some nasty tornadoes in Iowa. If it's really supposed to be bad weather, the PDS Watch will probably be tied to either a 'moderate' or 'high' risk of severe weather.

The rare PDS label comes from watches issued by the NWS's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. There isn't such thing, according to NOAA, as anything like a 'derecho warning' but there are wind warnings like 'hurricane force wind watch'. But the NWS says they'll release a Severe Thunderstorm Warning if a derecho is headed your way.

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