As extreme weather increases in Canada, new lab seeks to understand the science and future of our storms

What stays with Hayley Pullen is how fast it all happened.

On the Saturday afternoon before Victoria Day in 2022, Ms. Pullen was at her home in Uxbridge, Ont., where she had just come inside after tidying up from a backyard barbecue the night before.

The forecast that day called for stormy weather. While Ms. Pullen was upstairs, the lights flickered. She called down to her 17-year-old daughter, the only other person home that day, to say that the storm might be a big one.

Moments later, a roaring wind struck the house with the force of a bulldozer.

“As I came down the stairs, the porch went and the trees went and then the windows blew,” Ms. Pullen said in an interview. “My daughter was screaming for me to get in the basement.”

According to Ms. Pullen, the next several minutes felt like hours. By the time Ms. Pullen and her daughter thought it was safe to come out of the basement, her century-old house – though still standing – had shifted on its foundation and would ultimately have to be torn down. Her porch had been flung into the neighbour’s driveway. All around were flattened trees. Across the street, a hydro pole had snapped like a toothpick.

“It looked like the apocalypse had just hit,” she said.

What had hit was not the apocalypse but a derecho – an extensive windstorm that tore a 1,000 kilometre-long swath of destruction across southern Ontario and Quebec. Before it was done, the event had spawned four tornadoes and several downbursts, killed 16 people and caused an estimated $1.2-billion in insured losses.

The derecho is just one of several mammoth disasters caused by extreme weather across Canada in recent years.

Now this event, and others like it, will be the focus of a new laboratory at Western University in London, Ont., the university announced on Monday. There, researchers will seek to better understand the science, the risk and the future of severe storms in Canada.

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The initiative, called the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory, is supported by a $20-million donation from ImpactWX, a Toronto-based philanthropy founded by Travis Farncombe. Mr. Farncombe is a member of Canada’s Thomson family, which owns The Globe and Mail through the private holding company Woodbridge.

“We want to look at any hazard associated with severe thunderstorms and be an authoritative source for governments, industry, academia and the public,” said David Sills, an atmospheric scientist who will play a leading role in the new laboratory’s projects together with founding director Greg Kopp, an engineer who specializes in structural damage due to wind.

The effort builds on the work of the Northern Tornadoes Project, which was launched in 2017, initially as collaboration with Dr. Kopp at Western University and Dr. Sills, who was then with Environment and Climate Change Canada. Dr. Sills moved his portion of the research to Western University two years later. While the federal department is responsible for forecasts and issues public weather alerts, the project at Western has pursued more fundamental questions about how tornadoes behave in Canada and what that means for storm preparedness.

Along they way, the project’s goal has been to document every tornado that takes place in Canada.

While North America, by virtue of its geography, is the most tornado-prone continent in the world, knowledge about the phenomena has historically been based on research and observations made in the United States. That has now begun to change. As of this month, the Northern Tornado Project’s dashboard includes data on more than 1,800 damaging wind events across Canada, including 810 tornadoes.

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EXPLORE THE NTP DASHBOARD:

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The new laboratory will continue the work on tornadoes, as well as hailstorms – which the group began studying in 2022 – and expand to look more broadly at the dynamics and effects of severe thunderstorms across the country. This includes flash flooding caused by sudden storms. The group had its first experience with documenting this type of event in July when the city of Toronto was inundated with record rainfall.

Dr. Kopp said the objective remains “operational research, to get real data on real events.” By mining that data, he added, the laboratory seeks to help mitigate the risk and cost of severe storms and optimize investment in resilience measures.

Through the Northern Tornadoes Project, the group is already under contract with Canada’s National Research Council to develop building code provisions for tornadoes. For this work, the project’s data on tornado occurrence and intensity are combined with wind tunnel tests on full-scale structures to arrive at recommendations.

The need has never been greater.

According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, severe weather during the summer of 2024 cost more than $7-billion – about 10 times the annual average between 2001 and 2010. In particularly, about 40 per cent of this year’s damages were due to a record-breaking storm that pummelled Calgary with hailstones a large as golf balls in August, which a team from Western University was on hand to document.

Looming over such incidents is the question of how climate change is altering and potentially worsening storms in Canada. This is notoriously difficult to answer.

Global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is unquestionably injecting more energy into the atmosphere, and this is now having a discernible effect on a range of large-scale phenomenon, including temperature, precipitation patterns and ocean heating, which boosts hurricanes.

But while severe storms are a byproduct of larger weather patterns, they are also extremely local, rapidly unfolding at scales that are too fine for climate models to simulate. This, in turn, puts a premium on data that can be used as a basis of comparison to see if there are trends in the timing, frequency, location or severity of storms going forward.

For those who work with the Northern Tornadoes Project, that means trying to identify and access areas of storm damage as quickly as possible, before clean-up activities remove crucial evidence of precisely what happened. Project members are on standby, particularly at peak storm season in the summer.

That was the case in May, 2022, when the project was on the scene in Uxbridge the day after the derecho, with cameras and drones documenting the damage, including to Ms. Pullen’s neighbourhood. The data would later be used to verify that a tornado had indeed touched down there.

“One thing we’ve learned through that event is that our ability to even detect extreme storms is not great,” said Dr. Sills, referring to Canada’s weather infrastructure as a whole. For example, a number of weather stations that might have recorded peak wind speeds during the derecho had various failures that made data retrieval difficult or impossible. A research paper with a full analysis of the derecho from the Northern Tornadoes Project is still in the works, he said.

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Until recently, Canada has lagged in this kind of data gathering, in part because the country is so thinly populated. Weather forecasts tend to focus on where the people are. In previous decades, when bad storms or tornadoes struck isolated wilderness areas they would often go unnoticed. Yet it’s important to capture these events to better understand how and where storm conditions arise everywhere and how those conditions are changing.

Not surprisingly, one of the oldest centres of severe storm research is the National Severe Storms Laboratory based in Oklahoma, which sits adjacent to the “tornado alley” region of the midwestern United States.

Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist with the lab, said the Canadian data was helping to illuminate the zone of tornado activity that extends north of the border.

“Anytime we start looking in new places we’re going to get a different sample of how things happen,” Dr Brooks said.

One of the benefits of the new Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory is the opportunity to share both data and methods with international counterparts.

There are several areas where this could be realized, said Pieter Groenemeijer, who leads the European Severe Storms Laboratory and is based in Germany. His facility has, for example, pioneered methods for monitoring storms in real time.

On the flip side, he added, the Canadian group’s methods for surveying damaged areas using drones is a technology that could aid in a coming three-year campaign to document severe storms across central Europe.

“That is where we can really use the expertise that has already been achieved in Canada,” Dr. Groenemeijer said.

Some of the work by collaborators of the Canadian lab goes beyond the physical details of severe storms and the damage they cause. Jennifer Spinney, a sociocultural anthropologist at York University, said the data gathered by the Western University group can also aid studies aimed at improving awareness and understanding of hazards and help those who are in the path of storms to take appropriate actions to protect themselves.

“It’s not just a technological fix that can reduce the impacts,” Dr. Spinney said. “We also need to understand this human dimension.”

She added this is an especially complex problem when it comes to the risk of severe storms because the impacts can be highly localized and variable. And the differences encompass not only immediate reactions to a threat but factors and vulnerabilities that may worsen damage or lengthen the disruption long after a storm has passed.

Back in Uxbridge, Ms. Pullen said she can relate to the long shadow that severe weather events can cast, and the importance of research to help reduce such effects.

While no one in her family was harmed in the May, 21, 2022, derecho, she and her husband have yet to rebuild the house they lost. The storm continues to be a presence through the ongoing disruption of their lives.

It’s an experience that is never far from her awareness.

“As soon as I know there’s a storm coming, I’m storm tracking and I’m watching,” she said. “I don’t think that ever goes.”

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Storm country

In 2017, researchers at Western University began gathering data about tornadoes, hail and other severe weather events across Canada. What they have uncovered is a land of storms, with losses in the billions and a growing footprint of extreme weather on lives and property. Here are four key events that helped to shape the research group’s work.

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