URBANDALE, Iowa —
One of the hardest-hit buildings in central Iowa during the 2020 derecho was the Buccaneer Arena in Urbandale.
The facility lost parts of its roof, ultimately pushing the organization to build a brand new arena at Merle Hay Mall.
Looking at the Urbandale site today, you can see the patched-up work a year after the powerful wind storm.
It's no secret a storm of the derecho's magnitude was not anticipated by meteorologists. Severe weather was possible, but the message to the public wasn't too different from any other severe weather day in Iowa.
TUESDAY AT 8 P.M.: Watch a live Q&A with Chief Meteorologist Brad Edwards about the 2020 Iowa derecho
Weather forecast models leading up to the event showed a lot of possibilities from potential severe weather to no rain at all.
Long story short: a lot had to go wrong for a derecho to develop.
"There had to be a whole series of other events that either did or did not happen in a specific order in order to have the environment right for the development of a derecho," Patrick Skinner, a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma's Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS), told Local 5.
The Warn-on-Forecast system (WoFS) would have been very useful to forecasters in August 2020, had it been available.