Rob Been was taking a nap after dinner on his farm northwest of Moose Jaw, Sask. last month when a throne woke him up.
Looking out the window, he saw a tornado pass by. Eventually, the tornado was given an EF-0 rating, the lowest possible force rating for a tornado, but it seemed strange to Been that he did not receive any warning of the impending storm until long after it disappeared.
“If it can show up anywhere, you’d like to have some sort of notification instead of 45 minutes later,” Been said.
TARGET | Canada’s tornado warnings fail to meet targets:
A recent analysis of tornadoes and tornado warnings in Canada between 2019 and 2021 by the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) at Western University in London, Ontario, shows that Been’s experience is not out of the ordinary.
In what it calls a “report card” on tornado warning performance, the NTP rated Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), the federal agency responsible for issuing weather warnings, in three categories.
The first focused on what fraction of all tornadoes from 2019 to 2021 had a tornado warning. The ECCC target is 50%, but the NTP found that only 26% received warnings.
The figure rises to 28% when only tornadoes that occurred within the range of ECCC radars are taken into account, and to 38% when only tornadoes rated EF-2 and above are taken into account.
Canada’s Environmental and Climate Change Warning System was scrutinized after a tornado struck Barrie, Ontario in July 2021. Residents complained on social media that they had received a tornado warning. after it had already happened. (Grant Linton / CBC)
The second category scored ECCC’s performance in achieving its goal of issuing a warning at least 10 minutes before a tornado touched down, 60 percent of the time. The NTP found that this was only 9.5 percent of the time. It increased to 12.5% when only EF-2 and higher rated tornadoes are considered.
The final category scored how often a tornado clock preceded a tornado warning in the actual landing cases of a tornado. The ECCC target of a clock emitted six hours before a landing 80% of the time was relaxed to one hour by the NTP, but still resulted in a success rate of only the 12.1%.
In total, ECCC scored 37.5 points out of 100 on the NTP’s transcript.
NTP offers recommendations
NTP CEO David Sills described the data as “quite surprising”. He said looking south of the border at the U.S. National Weather Service could improve warning statistics in Canada, as the probability of detecting tornadoes there is quite high.
“For every U.S. radar, there’s an inbound forecasting team,” Sills said. “While there are only a handful of offices (ECCCs) across Canada.”
David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University in London, Ontario, says more staff is needed at ECCC forecasting centers in Canada to better monitor tornado storms. (Zoom)
In addition to training and improvements to forecasting tools, Sills said the number of ECCC tornado warning issues should be increased, even if a tornado does not end up touching the ground.
“If you don’t issue tornado warnings about storms that you think could be returned, you’ll never get a statistical forecast,” he said.
Sills said this was the NTP’s first tornado warning assessment, but plans to do more in the future.
Improvements made, with more to come says ECCC
Joanne St-Coeur, Director of the Meteorological Service of Canada, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Meteorological Forecasting Arm, said the ECCC has made progress in alerting the public to returning storms, such as the creation of its own weather app and working to update its 33. of its radar sites.
He said the comparison with U.S. data is a bit unfair, given Canada’s sparser population and the fact that many tornadoes here are much weaker.
“We are a country more prone to bad weather during the winter than in the summer months,” St-Coeur said.
St-Coeur said the ECCC is looking for ways to detect tornadoes in areas that do not have radar coverage and plans to change the way tornado warnings are issued to cover smaller, more specific areas.
“There’s always room for improvement,” he said.