Ontario may now be Canada’s tornado capital, researchers say
CTV
A Prairie province previously thought to be the tornado capital of Canada has been dethroned by Ontario, according to new data by tornado researchers out of Western University.
A Prairie province previously thought to be the tornado capital of Canada has been dethroned by Ontario, according to new data by tornado researchers out of Western University.
David Sills, the executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project (NPT), which was launched in 2017 to gather data on tornado occurrences, said that earlier statistical analysis showed that southern Saskatchewan should be the “big bull's eye in Canada for tornado activity.”
“Since we started the project, the number of tornadoes in Saskatchewan has not been nearly as much as we thought,” Sills told CP24.com on Wednesday.
Sills said researchers look at the climatology of tornados over 30-year periods. Between 1980 and 2009, Saskatchewan took top spot in Canada with 17.4 tornadoes per year.
“We just did an updated version, a new 30-year period from 1991 to 2020, and lo and behold it's Ontario that comes up on top (with) 18.3 tornadoes per year,” Sills said.
“We were finding in Ontario and in Quebec, there's been quite a bit of activity since we started the project. So that's been a bit of a surprise all of the tornado activity that's going on in Eastern Canada.”
Sills said since the NPT was launched, it has documented “well over” 700 tornadoes across Canada.
