The Northern Tornadoes Project – Overview and Initial Results

An ambitious new initiative – the Northern Tornadoes Project – has been undertaken with a primary goal of studying tornado occurrence in Canada and assessing true tornado risk. The collaborative study involving London, Ontario’s University of Western Ontario and Environment and Climate Change Canada employs new high-resolution satellite imagery resources, geo-referenced aerial imagery, and – where possible – thorough ground surveys.

The first ‘pilot’ season during summer 2017 focused on the detection of tornadoes in massive, sparsely populated, mostly forested regions of Ontario and Quebec. Nine tornadoes were identified that would otherwise not have been verified by ECCC meteorological operations, and tornado data were improved in another nine cases, with one tornado upgraded from EF-2 to EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Included in these totals are 11 supercell tornadoes from a single day in Quebec, now the province’s largest recorded tornado outbreak and one of the most significant recorded outbreaks in Canadian history.

The methods used and detailed results will be presented, along with preliminary results from summer 2018 and plans for the future.