Mid-latitude Cyclones

• These storms develop outside the tropics -- they are often called "extratropical cyclones" -- and, unlike their tropical cousins, they usually derive from fronts. Mid-latitude cyclones are often born as low-pressure cells along the boundary of continental polar and maritime tropical air masses.
  
  

Winds

• The strongest winds in a mid-latitude cyclone usually occur in its mature, or "occluded," phase, when its center experiences the lowest pressure readings -- comparable to a Category 3 hurricane in extreme cases, according to Ackerman and Knox's "Meteorology."
  
  

Speeds

• Winds at the surface near the low-pressure center of a big, mid-latitude cyclone affecting the Midwest in 1998 were clocked at 93 miles per hour in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Even greater gusts of better than 100 miles per hour were estimated for the November, 1975 cyclone that destroyed the Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore freighter, in Lake Superior.