Tornado touched down in Fergus Sunday, research team confirms

A tornado with winds between 90 and 130 kilometres an hour touched down in Fergus on Sunday night.

The Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University confirmed the tornado after visiting the town on Monday and doing a ground and drone survey of the area.

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

"As this line of storms entered southern Ontario, there was some intensification as it went through London and Kitchener areas. And we noticed that there was this area of rotation associated with this as well," Sills said.

"Our new radar network that we have across Canada now can actually pick up tornado debris when it's in the air. And we did notice a couple of scans from the radar near Fergus where it looked like there was tornado debris being lifted. So we had an inclination that there may have been a tornado there and sent the the team, the NTP survey team the next morning."

The tornado was assigned a preliminary rating of E-F-Zero which clocks winds at between 90 and 130 kilometres per hour.

It's the second tornado in this area this year. In August, an EF2 tornado touched down in Ayr.

Snapped trees and property damage

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

"South of Fergus 15km," posted Scott Moore.

"Six mature spruce trees downed or snapped off. Bench of front porch flipped over and smashed. Siding damage on the house too."

Steven Flisfeder is a meteorolgoist 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 there was a severe thunderstorm warning in effect for the Fergus area, but it's not "as clear cut as you might think" when it comes to putting out a tornado warning.

"In this particular case, the time of year itself would make it a little harder to actually make that decision to pull the trigger to issue a tornado warning. It's very rare that tornadoes occur in November in Ontario," he said, noting this is only the sixth or seventh November tornado ever in the province.

"Added to that, this particular severe storm was what we would call squall line. Most likely hazards associated with that are straight line winds as opposed to traumatic or spinning winds."

He said they saw winds in the area, "but that rotation necessary for that confidence to issue a tornado warning wasn't quite there."

'Chaotic nature of weather'

Flisfeder says this is an example of "the somewhat chaotic nature of weather in general" and that's why it's important people have a reliable weather source to get updates on what's happening in their area.

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

"One thing that we can expect with a warming environment is a longer [tornado] season because with the extra warmth during the shoulder seasons, you just introduce those extra possibilities of getting these storms," said Sills.

"We have a lot of data to collect to show that this season may be lengthening. That's certainly something that's expected from from climate change, is that because of the warming air we'll have a longer severe weather season."