The Northern Tornadoes Project is a research initiative at the University of Western Ontario that focuses on tornadoes and other severe convective storm-related wind phenomena in Canada. It was founded in 2017 by Greg Kopp and David Sills, [1] [2] with the financial support of Toronto-based social impact fund ImpactWX. [3]
The Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) was launched in 2017 to improve the detection, assessment and documentation of tornadoes in Canada, particularly for the vast, non-urban regions of the country with low population density, and ultimately determine the true tornado climatology of the country. While piloted aircraft were used initially to identify areas of wind-related damage in forested areas of Ontario and Quebec, high-resolution satellite imagery (nominal resolution 3 m) available on a near-daily basis became a key dataset, allowing the documentation of many tornadoes in Canada's northern forested areas that would otherwise not be identified. [4]
An early success was documenting Quebec's largest tornado outbreak on record in 2017 (17 on June 18). [5] However, this record was tied the very next year (17 on September 5). [5] These were among the largest tornado outbreaks ever recorded in Canada.
The NTP's scope was increased in 2019 to include all tornadoes and other thunderstorm-related damaging wind events (e.g., downbursts) across Canada [4] , with Sills becoming director [6] and Kopp serving as the ImpactWX Chair in Severe Storm Engineering.
Kopp and Sills went on to co-found the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory (CSSL), a partnership between the University of Western Ontario and ImpactWx, in 2024. [7] [8] [9] The work of the NTP, and other projects, continues under the umbrella of the CSSL.
The NTP team under Sills detects, assesses and documents all Canadian tornadoes, makes tornado data publicly available via an open data portal and dashboards that can be used to map event data. [4] It also conducts research using the collected data, including climatology and trend analysis, [10] [11] [12] techniques to improve tornado detection and wind speed estimation, [4] and tornado warning verification. [13]
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Other Scientific Articles
The work of the NTP has been featured on TV and radio, [14] newspapers, [15] magazines, [16] [17] and podcasts [18] [19] in Canada and the United States.
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