Ontario based “Northern Tornadoes Project” calling on citizen scientists to report tornadoes this summer

If you’re a weather watcher who takes an active interest in capturing severe weather events like tornadoes on video, the Ontario based Northern Tornado Project (NTP) wants to hear from you.

Based out of the University of Western Ontario, the NTP works with Environment Canada and the University of Manitoba to try to capture information on as many tornadoes that occur across the country as possible. The aim is to eventually develop better warning systems and to understand how climate change affects the prevalence and incidence of the storms.

Project Executive Director, Dr. David Sills says it all began in 2017 in Ontario and Quebec as a way to identify tornadoes in sparsely populated areas. The project expanded in 2019 to include the rest of Canada. A team of meteorologists, scientists and researchers look at weather patterns and radar to track storms and identify when and where they might occur.

“There’s a lot of people in Canada who think it’s an American problem and we get the occasional one here or there and it’s not such a big deal here. When in fact, come July or August in Canada, we can have a tornado every bit as strong as those in the United States. It’s just that the season is shorter here.”

In Saskatchewan there are an average of 18 tornadoes every year, and more than 60 across the country, based on data from 1980-2009.

This year, social media and ‘citizen scientists’ will play a bigger role than ever before. The NTP team can cover many parts of Ontario, but travelling to other provinces and sharing information with others won’t happen this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic and physical distancing requirements.

“We really don’t have a true picture of what the tornado risk is across Canada,” said Sills.”So that’s a big part of the project. Getting a full picture of how many tornadoes there are occurring across the country.”

Getting that key information from those who live in the prairies will be a key component to their research.

“A lot of times it’s the only evidence we have, that something has occurred. Because we see on radar that a storm has gone by, it may have looked like it had tornado potential, but you don’t know what happened on the ground until someone reports it, typically.

“We’re asking this year, if people do see severe weather, and they’re able to record it with their cell phones or something similar, please find a way to get it to us, through social media channels.”

Sills wants to make it clear however, they’re not encouraging people to specifically go storm chasing. Safety is the number one priority. Don’t get too close to a tornado, and don’t chase any of them.

However, if you do see an adverse weather event and you are safely able to record information, you can submit videos or still pictures of funnel clouds, tornadoes on the ground and even the subsequent damage to NTP@uwo.ca, on Twitter it’s #SKNTP, and there’s also a reporting page.

You can also report the information to Environment Canada.