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Canada has had 86 tornadoes so far this year, with two pending confirmation.

The rest of the provinces, in order, according to the NTP dashboard, are as follows: Quebec 14, Alberta 8, Manitoba 7, Nova Scotia 3, New Brunswick 2. The two pending ones are in Quebec and British Columbia.

“Pretty much an average year,” summed up professor , in a recent phone interview.

What leaps out at him from this year’s numbers, he said, is that of the 32 tornadoes on the Prairies this year, none of them “has reached the intensity of EF 2 or higher. It’s all been EF 0, EF 1, and this is the first year since we started the project in 2017 we’ve seen that — usually they get a couple. That’s a bit unusual.”

It’s a similar story across the country, he added, where “there haven’t been many EF 2s at all, just a few.”

Last year, he said it was similar story with “just a scattering of EF 2 tornadoes, mostly in the northern regions” but with the notable exception of an “EF 4 that happened just north of Calgary that was the big outlier that year.”

Like the Richter scale measures earthquakes, the Enhanced Fujita (EF) Scale is used to measure tornadoes, with 0 being the lowest and five being the highest.

The bigger tornado events that come to mind this year, he said was , starting in Ontario with a downburst at Moffat Landing and crossing into Quebec, where most of the tornadoes occurred in the Temiscamingue and Val-d’Or area. Ultimately, there were three EF 2 tornadoes, three EF 1s, an EF 0 and two downbursts. “So that was a pretty significant event,” he said.

There was a cluster in the Fort Erie area of Niagara region “on Aug. 5 that affected quite a few people.”

“There were two EF 1s and an EF 0 and it actually crossed into Buffalo, caused damage in downtown Buffalo, so that got a lot of media interest.”

A tornado that hit Ayr near Kitchener on Aug. 17 “is currently rated EF 1 and we are likely going to upgrade that to EF 2. So that will be our only EF 2 in southern Ontario this year,” he said.

Not that tornado season is over.

Most of the tornadoes in Canada “happen in June, July, August right across Canada and on the Prairies — that’s the main season,” said Sills, adding that July is the peak month. “If you get into southern Ontario and southern Quebec, we do get into a bit longer season.”

Indeed, .

“The first tornado this year was in Ontario, March 16,” said Sills, adding it “was a storm down in Essex County near Windsor, Ont.”

And, no, it didn’t set a record.

“That ties the record for earliest recorded Ontario tornado — in Clifford, Ont., in 2016,” .

As for the latest we can expect a tornado?

The latest in the NTP data, which so far only goes back to 1980, he said, “was out near Brockville, a place called Charleville, Nov. 23, 2013.”

It was so unique, explained Sills, “we did a study on this.”

“All the local weather stations were saying it was either –1 C or cooler and actually the report was that there was a children’s party and the kids went outside because there was these snowballs falling and they were catching the snowballs in their hands. And I think this was kind of like  — it’s like the hail before it really freezes over.

“And then they brought them (the children) all inside quickly because a tornado started coming across the farm yard.”

The forecasters, he said, definitely “didn’t see that one coming. I don’t think anyone would have. The weather office, they were busy issuing lake effect snow warnings that day, and not tornado warnings.”

As to how a tornado could form, he explained, “A thunderstorm forming is all about instability, It’s not so much the temperature at the surface but the temperature difference between the surface and what’s above.

“And so if you get a really, really cold air mass aloft such that there’s a big temperature difference between what’s aloft and what’s at the surface and mix that with some kind of push — like in this case there was a little low pressure system that was pushing across giving it a little lift — and suddenly you’ve got conditions for a thunderstorm.

“Add in some wind shear, you can get a tornado.

“It doesn’t matter the time of year. If conditions come together the right way, then it can happen.”

Not that it happens often in November. For the month of November, he said, there are 14 tornadoes in the NTP database going back to 1980.

“And we don’t have anything in December, January, February. So since 1980, it (tornado season) has been March through November.”

Here the number of tornadoes in Canada since 2017 (with Ontario’s numbers in brackets)

• 2024: 86, plus two pending (32)
• 2023 86 (39)
• 2022 129 (53)
• 2021 124 (68)
• 2020 110 (69)
• 2019 80 (19)
• 2018 104 (38)
• 2017 71 (13)

A caveat, said Sills, is that the figures can change, usually upwards.

“Once the season is over, we go back over everything again with satellite imagery,” he said.

Last year, he said, “I think we found 10 tornadoes that we didn’t see the first time around through this, so that really upped our numbers.”

Satellite imagery can help to find evidence of tornadoes that may have occurred in vast, sparsely inhabited areas of Ontario and Canada where there would be few eyewitnesses to report, he said.