Western University ‘tornado detectives’ set out to demystify Canada’s twister history
WASHINGTON — Confirming a tornado in Canada used to be a bit like the proverbial tree falling in the woods: If no one was there to see it, it never officially happened.
But a group of Canadian weather scientists, engineers and university students is out to change all that with modern technology and hard-hitting forensics – plus a no small amount of that aforementioned fallen wood.
“I like to think of myself more as a tornado detective,” said Connell Miller, a full-time wind engineer with the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University in London, Ont.
“I am not personally going out to put myself in danger. I leave that to the storm chasers.”
Founded in 2017 with the help of ImpactWX, a Toronto-based social impact fund focused on mitigating the effects of severe weather, the project is fast becoming a pioneer in post-tornado research.
With climate change on the horizon, the fund’s goals include better detection and prediction of tornadoes and a broader understanding of extreme atmospheric events, all with a view to protecting people and property.
Canada is second only to the United States in tornado frequency. But until the Northern Tornadoes Project, the actual number of twister touchdowns north of the border was a mystery — pegged at about 60 a year.
In reality, the typical annual total is more than double that number.
“We didn’t think the number of tornadoes reported in Canada each year was accurate — we thought it was low,” said project co-founder Greg Kopp, a Western engineering professor and wind effects expert.
“So we started looking for those missing tornadoes.”
Using high-resolution drone-mounted cameras and satellite imagery, the team can get a detailed bird’s eye view of the aftermath and look for telltale signs of tornado activity — haphazard tree fall patterns, for example, rather than the uniform damage that may result. indicate a downburst or straight wind.
The project helped confirm a record 117 tornadoes in 2021 and another 117 in 2022 — figures that are a function of increased surveillance rather than higher frequency. But Kopp and company are well aware that climate change is changing the equation.
“There is some evidence that things may get worse in Canada with the changing climate as things move north and the southern US becomes too hot and dry.”
This year’s season is just getting started, and the project has confirmed 30 tornadoes in 2023 alone, including a vicious EF4 twister on Canada Day that swept Didsbury, Alta, with winds between 167 and 200 mph.
Miller was on the ground the next day, part of a team of forensic investigators who used wind tunnel testing, eyewitness accounts and drones to investigate the aftermath and deduce the perpetrator’s characteristics.
“The community that experienced this tornado has been very lucky, I think,” he said — EF4 and EF5 events, the most violent, destructive categories on the Enhanced Fujita scale, usually include fatalities.
“Fortunately, they were warned in time and people who were in vulnerable places came to places where they would be safe.”
In the US, the 2023 season has already proven to be a busy one, according to data from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, which works to maximize the efficiency of charitable giving to affected communities and residents.
By the end of June, more than 800 tornadoes had been confirmed in the US, with 170 recorded last month alone. There were 128 twisters in January, the second-highest total ever recorded in a month that’s usually not that busy.
Most of them strike in the Great Plains corridor known as Tornado Alley, a loosely defined area stretching north from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas all the way to the Dakotas.
In recent years, however, studies have found that the region has expanded eastward, capturing parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, and Illinois.
The deadliest year in recent U.S. history was 2011, when a multivortex EF5 tornado struck Joplin, Mo.
Tornadoes have killed nearly 75 people in the US so far this year, a number already three times the total for all of 2022, making 2023 one of the 10 deadliest years on record.
That included an EF4 twister on March 24 in Mississippi that was more than a mile wide and claimed 21 lives for more than an hour on the ground, with peak winds of 170 mph.
It’s all a troubling omen of what’s to come for both Canada and the US, especially given how difficult it’s always been to predict severe tornadoes, let alone identify populated areas where they could make landfall.
“Improving alert performance means assessing how you’re doing with your prediction and alerting — and to do that, part of it is knowing what actually happened on the ground,” Kopp said.
“If you don’t systematically try to identify the tornadoes and then compare them to your warning performance, you’re not going to improve.”
That’s what the project did in 2022, using the confirmed tornado data from 2019 through 2021 to determine if and when Environment and Climate Change Canada was able to issue timely public warnings for those events.
The results were disappointing, if not surprising: a score of 37.5 out of 100, based on criteria such as whether and when tornado “watches” and the more urgent “warnings” were successfully deployed.
Project members also pay close attention to structural damage to determine if building codes have been followed correctly and if changes to those codes could be a useful and cost-effective way to reduce the hazards.
It would be nearly impossible to prevent the kind of damage an EF4 or EF5 can do, but the vast majority of tornadoes in Canada occur on a much smaller scale, Miller said.
Researchers have found that in a number of cases, requiring a more robust “roof-to-wall connection” would only add about $200 to construction costs while dramatically reducing the risk of roof detachment.
Not only would that help keep occupants safer, but it’s another piece of potentially lethal debris that won’t fly off and cause even greater damage, like shrapnel from a bomb.
“We can make sure these homes can withstand those EF2 winds and be safe from 95 percent of Canadian tornadoes,” he said.
“I think for the $200 it would cost, it would be more than worth doing this.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 8, 2023.
