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EAST TEXAS (KLTV) - Most of the damage reports caused by weather in East Texas each year come from severe thunderstorms. These thunderstorms become severe by producing large, destructive hail, damaging winds, and even tornadoes.

You may not be aware of this, but there are certain criteria that have to be met in order for the National Weather Service to issue a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for areas downstream that could be in the path of harm’s way.

So what exactly makes a storm severe? Any thunderstorm or thunderstorm complex that is capable of producing wind gusts greater than 58 mph and/or hail that is at least one inch in diameter or larger, which is the size of quarters, will prompt the issuance of a severe thunderstorm warning.

Just one of these criteria has to be met in order to prompt a severe thunderstorm warning, but in some cases, both high winds and hail are possible within the same storm.

Tornadoes also make up a severe storm, but they are almost their own separate category since any storm that rotates and are capable of producing tornadoes get put under a tornado warning.

Many of you are familiar with the Wireless Emergency Alert system on your phone. It is also referred to as WEA for short. This is located in the ‘notifications’ settings on your smartphone.

The most common alert we receive from the Wireless Emergency Alert is from Amber Alerts and Civil Abduction Emergencies.

But did you know that several weather alerts can now be sent out via the Government Alerts on your smartphone? As long as you have Emergency Alerts enabled and have the ‘Public Safety Alerts’ tab turned on, you can get life-saving weather alerts for the most significant, severe weather in your area.

However, prior to 2021, the National Weather Service had no good way of blasting out severe thunderstorm warnings on the WEA for the most intense, significant severe thunderstorms that pose the biggest threat to life and property.

After all, not all severe thunderstorms are created equal.

So in order to do this, they revamped their structure of categorizing severe thunderstorms by placing tags on the individual warnings since some storms are more capable of producing more damage than others.

So here is how the new tag warning system works.

If doppler radar or storm spotters observe winds 58 mph or greater and hail that is one inch in diameter, or the size of quarters, then we get a base severe thunderstorm.

If a severe storm is capable of producing 70 mph winds and hail up to the size of golf balls, which is 1.75″ in diameter, then a ‘considerable’ tag gets issued on that particular warning.

Finally, if a severe storm shows signs of producing 80 mph winds or greater and baseball size hail or larger, which is 2.75″ in diameter, then it will get a ‘destructive’ tab labeled on the warning.

It is this ‘destructive’ tag that will initiate the WEA on your smartphone, alerting you to a thunderstorm that poses an enhanced risk to life and property since it will do way more damage than a storm that barely meets severe criteria.

A destructive severe thunderstorm is very rare since only 10% of all severe thunderstorm warnings reach the destructive tag criteria nationwide each year.

If a ‘destructive’ tag is issued on a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, our First Alert Weather Team will now do live cut-ins on air, streaming on all of our digital platforms, treating it very much like a Tornado Warning.

In many cases, thunderstorms that produce destructive hail and damaging winds to this magnitude can do just as much, if more damage, than an EF-1 tornado.

For Project Tornado, I’m KTRE First Alert Chief Meteorologist Brad Hlozek.