A tornado with winds blowing between 90 and 130 kilometers per hour struck Fergus Sunday evening.

Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project confirmed the tornado after visiting the city Monday and conducting a ground and drone survey of the area.

David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project, said they noticed the weather system, a line of thunderstorms mixed with a cold front, moving from Michigan into southern Ontario. Tornado warnings were issued in Michigan.

“As this line of storms entered southern Ontario, it intensified somewhat as it moved through the London and Kitchener areas. And we noticed that there was also this area of rotation associated with that,” Sills said.

“Our new network of radars that we have now across Canada can actually detect tornado debris when it’s in the air. And we noticed a few scans from the radar near Fergus where it looked like tornado debris was being kicked up So we had a trend that maybe there had been a tornado there and sent out the NTP investigation team the next morning.

The tornado was given a preliminary rating of EF-Zero, with winds between 90 and 130 kilometers per hour.

This is the second tornado in this area this year. In August, a EF2 tornado touched down in Ayr.

Broken trees and property damage

A resident living south of Fergus reported the damage to his property on X, formerly Twitter.

“South of Fergus, 15 km,” Scott Moore posted.

“Six mature spruce trees downed or broken. Porch bench toppled and broken. Siding on house was also damaged.”

Steven Flisfeder is a meteorologist with Environment Canada and said Sunday’s conditions were an “unusual situation” where a low pressure system in southern Ontario was interacting with a second low pressure system in northern Ontario and they interacted.

He said a severe thunderstorm warning is in effect for the Fergus area, but it’s not “as clear cut as you might think” when it comes to issuing a tornado warning .

“In this particular case, the time of year itself would make it a little more difficult to make the decision to pull the trigger on issuing a tornado warning.” It’s very rare for tornadoes to occur in November in Ontario,” he said, noting that this is the case. only the tornado of the sixth or seventh of November in the province.

“On top of that, this particularly severe storm was what we would call a squall line. The most likely hazards associated with it are straight-line winds, as opposed to traumatic or turning winds.”

He said they saw winds in the area, “but the rotation needed for that confidence to issue a tornado warning wasn’t quite there.”

“Chaotic nature of time”

Flisfeder says this is an example of “the somewhat chaotic nature of weather in general” and is why it’s important for people to have a reliable weather source to get updates on what is happening in their region.

Sills says tornado season in Ontario typically runs from June to August, but if warm air from the Gulf meets a cold front in early spring or fall, those conditions can come together to generate a tornado.

“One thing we can expect with a warmer environment is a longer (tornado) season, because with the additional heat in the shoulder seasons, you just introduce these additional opportunities to get these storms,” Sills said .

“We have a lot of data to collect to show that this season could get longer. That’s certainly something that’s expected from climate change, is that due to warming of the air, we’ll have a longer severe weather season.”