What obliterated this Northwest Territories forest? A downburst
Global News
'To have that intensity of storms that far north, creating that kind of damage, is not something we’ve seen before.'
If extreme flooding and wildfires weren’t enough for the Northwest Territories in 2021, another extraordinary weather event snuck by almost unnoticed – unless you were a tree.
A downburst, one of the first ever recorded in the N.W.T., ripped through a patch of trees some 60 kilometres long and nine kilometres wide when it struck the Dehcho region, east of Fort Liard, on June 29.
Photographed from the air, the devastation made entire sections of forest look more like dried grass.
Details of the event were reported this week for the first time by the Northern Tornadoes Project.
A downburst is not a tornado, but its aftermath can look a lot like a tornado passed through.
Downbursts are powerful and fast storms with strong winds accompanied by rain, thunder, lightning and occasionally hail. Air rushing down from the storm spreads out in unusually destructive fashion, causing the damage to trees seen on June 29.
Wind speeds during the Dehcho storm reached up to 190 kilometres per hour, researchers believe. The downburst registered as the equivalent of an EF-2 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, a measurement of wind damage intensity where the lightest is EF-0 and the most severe is EF-5.
“To have an event of this magnitude up there? I think it may be the first of its kind,” said David Sills at Western University, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project.