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An eastern Canadian university crew is working to confirm a possible tornado touching down near Martensville or Middle Lake during an Aug. 20 thunderstorm.
On Friday, the Northern Tornadoes Project from Western University arrived in Saskatchewan to lok at the “really intense series of storms” that started from North Battleford, headed down to north of Saskatoon and the Middle Lake area, said Dr. Dave Sills, project director.
“It was a very long track and a lot of hail damage, a lot of wind damage.”
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He says confirming a tornado involves a lot of complex work. In this case, the team is looking for other clues, since the cause of wind damage in the area is unknown.
“So we look for telltale signs of either a tornado or a downburst,” he explained.
A downburst is air descending from a thunderstorm and spreading out on the ground.
“Once it reaches the ground sometimes it’s known as a plow wind — and that’ll produce a signature of widespread damage over a wide area,” Sills said, like the trees all down in the same direction.
“With a tornado we’re looking for a long, narrow path of damage. Sometimes we even find evidence of rotation in the damage.”
Jacqueline Klassen Thiessen captured this image of the storm from Saskatoon’s Lakeview area Aug. on 20 around 9 p.m. (Facebook)
He said his team is also looking at radar readings to determine specific spots to investigate.
Because of the size of the storm and the length it travelled, Sills said that it could be a while before the team can determine whether or not a tornado touched down.
“In this case … we have a long track. We had multiple supercell thunderstorms that were overlapping,” he said, adding that it might take four or five days to collect the data and “untangle all of the various factors in this particular case.”
Sills said while they have their data on the storm, they could always use more information and encouraged anyone who had significant damage to their home, property or vehicle to email ntp@uwo.ca.
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