New Canadian tornado climatology published including fact sheet
A new Canadian 30-year tornado climatology has been published by NTP researchers in the Canadian peer-reviewed journal Atmosphere-Ocean. It can be freely accessed here.
The paper describes how new high-quality tornado tornado event data covering the years 1980 to 2016 were generated, with NTP data from 2017 to 2020 comprising the rest of the updated database. This resulted in both an update to the original 30-year dataset from 1980 to 2009, and a new 30-year dataset from 1991 to 2020. And it is from this new 30-year dataset that the new tornado climatology for Canada is established.
Below are two charts from the paper, showing tornadoes by month and tornadoes by time of day.
A 'fact sheet' has also been prepared, full of statistics based on totals, means/medians and extremes over the 30-year period. That can be found here.
Tornado counts by month for all tornadoes (blue, left axis, n = 1923) and F/EF2 + tornadoes (magenta, right axis, n = 233) from 1991 to 2020. Note that for 25 tornadoes found using satellite imagery (mainly from the early 1990s) the date could not be narrowed down to a specific month and these events do not appear in the figure.
Tornado counts by local time of day for all tornadoes (blue, left axis, n = 1772) and F/EF2 + tornadoes (magenta, right axis, n = 220) from 1991 to 2020. Note that only tornado events with available time values were included. A time of ‘1700-‘ means all times between 1700 and 1759 LT.
