“Weather weirding” might be the best way to describe the summer of 2024 in Canada. Tornadoes in March to record-breaking warmth on Halloween to the most precipitation we’ve ever seen in Ontario. All of this contributed to the weird and difficult-to-forecast summer and fall weather across Canada. Great fun for this storm chaser, but maybe not so much for everyone else.
I’ve been chasing storms in Ontario since my very first tornado in 2001, and this was one of the most out there years for trying to nail down the timing and location of both thunderstorms and the accompanying tornadoes. However, I wasn’t sure if I was alone in this or if I was way off, and this was just a normal year. To figure it out, I headed down to London to talk to my friend and Director of the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory, Dr. Dave Sills.
“Number wise, I think we’re fairly normal, but it’s the intensity of the tornadoes that’s been a little different this year. Right across Canada, it’s mostly been EF-0 and EF-1 tornadoes, so on the weaker side. In Ontario, we’ve seen one EF-2 tornado, and that was the Ayr tornado.” Dave said.
The Ayr, Ont., tornado was one that I’m intimately aware of given that it began directly over my car as I raced towards what I thought was merely a well-structured storm south of a mass of grey skies. It was also early morning, and given that most tornadoes happen in the late afternoon with maximum heating, the timing was… weird. My first indication that a tornado was ongoing was a pile of debris across the road in front of me, and it was only much later when I reviewed the video that I realized the tornado was right in front of me, but I couldn’t see it thanks to its near total lack of contrast.
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The tornado would go on to rip the roof off a Home Hardware, wreck massive storage bins, and flip a number of train cars. All while forming up and dissipating in less than 20 minutes.
“We get a lot of different kinds of weather here [in Ontario], and the Great Lakes make tornado forecasting that much more difficult. The Ary tornado was an outlier timewise; it arrived at a time that’s rare for tornadoes. Also, the ingredients just didn’t appear on any of the guidance models that we use for forecasting. It was an outlier!”
Of course, I wanted to know if Dave thought this was out of the ordinary.
He replied, “In order to pull out trends, we need lots of data, and every year we collect a few hundred, and the data sets are building. However, given that tornadoes are rare events, it’s hard to pull these trends out. We do know that the number of intense tornadoes really isn’t changing, but we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of weaker ones. That’s most likely due to better data collection thanks to the public being more aware of these tornadoes and reporting them to us.”
“There have been a number of papers from the US showing a shift in the eastern extent of Tornado Alley from the sparsely populated areas in the Plains into the more populated areas in the east. This is not a good shift because more tornadoes around more people is not a good thing. We’re also seeing something similar in Canada, as we see a lot more tornadoes in Ontario and Quebec. Last year we saw one tornado in Saskatchewan and no Ef-2 or stronger this year. Is this a trend? Right now, we’re not sure. We need a lot more data to be statistically confident.”
Climate change is going to make things that much more difficult, especially as it extends our thunderstorm season across Canada, but especially in Ontario. The lakes, population, and increased amount of time when storms happen will make being aware of severe weather even more important as the atmosphere warms.
(Header image courtesy of worananphoto via Getty Images. Graphic used for illustration purposes only.)
