Researchers are on the ground north and east of Winnipeg on Thursday scan fields and forests to obtain damage signs after Funnel Cloud reports on a storm on Wednesday.
The members of the Northern Tornado project went to the areas of Oakbank and Birds Hill on Thursday to investigate possible tornadoes that caused the warnings of the environment and the climate change of Canada on Wednesday night.
“These turned out to be super cellular thunderstorms … that can generate the strongest tornadoes, so you should take them seriously,” said Dave Sills, director of the Northern Tornado project.
The project is based at the Western University of Ontario with collaborators in Manitoba and other places. It works in collaboration with Environment Canada to investigate TouchDowns reports of Tornados throughout Canada.
The meteorologist Scott Kehler, chief scientist of Weatherlogics, is confident that there was at least one official touchdown.
He went on Wednesday night to drive after seeing rotation patterns through the radar that hinted at the possibility of a tornado.
“These storms develop very quickly, so you must closely monitor what is happening,” he said. “Many hunters in the area reported that there were clouds of funnel or rotation areas seen with the storm.”
Kehler said he saw two clouds of funnel, including one that dissipated when he moved east of the 206 highway on the east side of the Birds Hill Provincial Park.
He saw another between Dugald and Oakbank.
“For my south, I saw a cloud of funnel, which was between Oakbank and Dugald, moving through some fields, so that one, I think … will be confirmed as a tornado by the Northern Tornado project,” Kehler said.
“When passing through those fields, there were some signs of soil damage.”
The damaged land is one of the factors used by tornado researchers to measure whether a funnel cloud touched or did not become a tornado. If so, the scope of the damage influences the qualification that the tornado obtains under the improved fujita scale (EF scale), a measure that reflects the size and intensity of a tornado.
Another revealing sign of the possibility of tornadoes is hail, Kehler said, something that had been corroborated until Wednesday night due to numerous accounts in southern Manitoba.
Robyn Dyck, a meteorologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, said Steinbach received room hail and the size of Loonie. Stonewall had a quarter of a quarter of size; St. Andrews was beaten with Loonie size hail; And Gunton reported Hail ten cents to the size of the golf ball, Dyck said.
“There were some really good photos, and no matter how good I mean they seemed that they were very close to the ground and in the radar it seemed that it could have been a tornado, but there will be more research,” Dyck said early Thursday. “We had no confirmation of any tornado so far.”
The activity of the tornado in Canada generally reaches its maximum point in the middle and end of July, Sills said.
He said that before Wednesday, Manitoba has had three tornadoes confirmed so far in 2025. That includes an E0, the weakest rating on the EF scale, which landed on Tuesday in large-Clairière, southwest of Brandon, and did not cause any damage, Sills said.
