Latest news with #DavidSills
CBC
02-05-2025
- Climate
- CBC
Manitoba's 1st tornado of 2025 recorded southeast of Niverville
Social Sharing Tornado season started in Manitoba this week with the first one touching down just southeast of Niverville, says an Ontario lab that tracks all tornadoes in Canada. It was weak but it's still "a bona fide tornado," said David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project, based at Western University in London, Ont. Officially, the Northern Tornadoes Project classifies it as a landspout-type tornado, which means its rotation couldn't be detected on satellite radar. It occurred around 5 p.m., about eight kilometres southeast of Niverville (about 35 kilometres south of Winnipeg) over a bare farm field. Soil from the field gently rotated in the spout. The tornadoes project received numerous reports from Manitoba with video and photos from multiple angles, Sills said. "Apparently the visibility was very good, because people were seeing it from miles away — lots of eyes on that one," he said. "Thankfully it just was brief. It didn't go very far." The tornadoes project will study high-resolution satellite imagery to get an estimate of the distance the tornado travelled. "Someone that was on the ground and was close by gave us an estimated track, so we'll be using that to look for evidence," Sills said. "Once we have a track, we can include that with the data on our dashboard." The tornado was given a default rating on the enhanced Fujita scale of EF0. That means there was no significant damage and wind speeds, though weaker, were at least 90 kilometres per hour. "You can't really see that kind of rotation on radar, so that's why we call these landspout-type tornadoes," Sills said. "When we start getting into more severe storms … those are the kind where you can actually see the storm itself rotating, and that can get picked up on radar, and forecasters can use that to help forecast the onset of the tornado." Landspout tornadoes aren't easy to forecast because they are "more or less randomly occurring around thunderstorms," he said. "And the most you'll usually get is an EF2, but most of them are EF0 or EF1." Environment Canada warning preparedness meteorologist Natalie Hassell said the national weather agency agrees with the tornadoes project researchers that an EF0 tornado touched down. It might not have been spawned from the storms in the area, which were quite small, she said. It appears the funnel cloud, which turned into the landspout, just formed from a low pressure system and cold front. "Both of these things would certainly be enough to start the vertical motion," she said. "In this case, the rotating column was visible as cloud formed in it, so we could actually see a funnel cloud and then see that it touched the ground." The first tornado of the year in Canada occurred April 12 north of Rolling Hills, Alta. It is also listed as an EF0. The tornadoes project is also investigating a potential one in Quebec from storms on the 29th. "So this one [in Manitoba] would actually be the third tornado documented in Canada this season," Sill said. "This is the time of year where the ingredients start to come together for tornadoes. Thankfully they've all been weak so far, nothing really substantial." But southern Manitoba is about to head straight into a sudden onset of summer-like weather, with temperatures of 25 C to 28 C forecast starting on Saturday. "It's those warm air masses that can lead to thunderstorms and potentially tornadoes if if the conditions are right," Sills said. "So this is the time of year when everybody needs to be more vigilant about watches and warnings and keeping an eye out when those are issued to make sure you stay out of trouble." The average number of tornadoes document in Manitoba per year, based on a 30-year average, is 8½. Saskatchewan, by comparison, sees 14½, and Ontario gets 18½. Canada's largest recorded tornado in history, however, occurred in Manitoba during the evening of June 22, 2007. The Elie tornado carried wind speeds estimated at between 420 km/h and 510 km/h and lasted about 40 minutes. It travelled about six kilometres, mostly through fields, but caused significant damage in the community of Elie, about 45 kilometres west of Winnipeg. It remains the only EF5 tornado ever recorded in Canada.
CBC
19-02-2025
- Politics
- CBC
London tornado researcher concerned changes at U.S. weather centre could disrupt cross-border research
New, restrictive policy directives aimed at U.S. climate and weather scientists have some Canadian researchers concerned about the future of their work and the future of a field that relies heavily on open data and cross-border collaboration. Emails seen by CBC News show staff at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are being directed to submit for review any correspondence with international counterparts that are scientific in nature and involve scientific data. The emails from NOAA's policy team, which were first reported by Wired, also direct employees to receive senior approval on "all upcoming international engagements" until the end of March. They must also submit any virtual meetings for review if they touch on particular topics, such as climate. "I'd say it's noticeably quieter. We're not getting a lot of emails from people that are working under NOAA," said David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP), based out of Western University in London, Ont. Sills said NTP hadn't heard anything official from anyone at NOAA about the changes but notes their researchers deal "quite a bit" with colleagues in the U.S. on a fairly regular basis. He expressed concern the directives could throw into question a planned summer conference on radar meteorology and five years of work developing a new enhanced Fujita scale (EF) for rating tornadoes, both done in collaboration with the U.S. "From what we've seen, everything seems not to be stopped but just 'under review.' We don't know what that means. Maybe they don't know what that means. But, of course, everything that we're hearing is worrying as far as future relationships." White House confirms '51st state' threats should be taken seriously, premier says 2 days ago Duration 9:01 A team of Canada's premiers met with senior White House officials last week as they continue to make the case against tariffs on Canadian goods. Andrew Furey, premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, says U.S. President Donald Trump's threats to make Canada the '51st state' should be taken as a serious threat to Canadian sovereignty. Data and research conducted by NOAA are intertwined with work done by Canadian climatologists and meteorologists, including at Environment and Climate Change Canada. The federal agency collaborates with NOAA through several initiatives, including the North American Ensemble Forecast System. The federal government told CBC News that it hadn't received any official notice of changes to its collaboration with NOAA. NTP doesn't receive any research funding from NOAA, and hasn't been directly impacted in that way like other universities, including the University of Windsor. Western University says none of its researchers currently receive NOAA funding. The research team does rely on NOAA resources in its work. NOAA manages a comprehensive network of weather radars, as well as two high-resolution weather satellites under the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite Program, or GOES, which launched 50 years ago this October. "I mean, we don't have any Canadian weather satellites that we can use every day for weather and for research," he said. Up until now, that data has been freely available for anyone to use. But as concerns mount about looming mass layoffs at NOAA and other U.S. agencies, part of a push by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to drastically scale back the federal workforce, largely without scrutiny, it's unclear if that will continue. In recent weeks, dozens of U.S. government web pages and data sets have been pulled from the internet by the Trump administration, prompting a guerilla effort to save them. "I don't think the data will stop. I hope not. But it's not out of the question that they will start charging a lot of money for this critical data, and that's certainly a concern," Sills said. The situation has led to a "chilling effect" across the board that has impacted every aspect of the work NTP does, Sills said, including collaboration with U.S. scientists outside NOAA who get funding through the National Science Foundation (NSF). On Tuesday, 11 per cent of NSF's staff was laid off, according to a Bloomberg report. In a statement to CBC News, Rachel Hager, NOAA Fisheries spokesperson, denied federal scientists had been ordered to stop communicating with international counterparts.
