2 tornadoes touched down near Winnipeg this week, investigators confirm

A team of tornado researchers have confirmed two touched down north and east of Winnipeg on Wednesday evening — one near Birds Hill Provincial Park and another in the Dugald  area.

That brings the total to three in Manitoba this week, according to David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project.

"Thankfully, these were not stronger tornadoes," Sills told CBC News on Friday. "This could have been worse."

In collaboration with Environment and Climate Change Canada, in recent years the Northern Tornadoes Project does the on the ground confirmatory work of determining whether a funnel cloud did in fact touch down and achieve tornado status.

The project, headquartered at Western University in London, Ont., had ground teams from the University of Manitoba head out Thursday to look for damage from reported funnel clouds in the Dugald and Birds Hill regions a day earlier.

They found a four kilometre-long swirling track pattern through crops, as well as minor tree damage associated with the tornado near Dugald.

Another track measuring about the same length, along with some tree damage, was discovered in the Birds Hill area Thursday, said Sills.

Damage — a factor in determining the strength of a tornado — was minimal in each case, so both were described as weak tornadoes. Each received an EF 0 rating on the enhanced Fujita scale (EF scale), which is a way scientists measure the size and intensity of twisters.

Sills said the super cell thunderstorms that produced both tornadoes are capable of producing EF 5 tornadoes.

"But thankfully they weren't powerful enough and long lived enough to produce some of the catastrophic-type damage that we've seen with other super cell tornadoes," he said.

It's the third confirmed tornado in the province this week.

Another verified by the team was in southwestern Manitoba in Grande-Clairière, northeast of Melita and southwest of Deleau, on Tuesday. It, too, was rated an EF 0.

No injuries were reported in any of the tornadoes this week. 

Despite three tornadoes in two days, Manitoba has had relatively few this year. On average, the province gets eight confirmed annually, said Sills, and this year only five have been verified.

That's been the broader pattern playing out nationally as well: there have only been 38 tornadoes this year, compared to 129 last summer — the second-highest on record, said Sills.

The exception this year is southern Saskatchewan, which makes up 17 — or half  of all tornadoes thus far in 2025.

Peak tornado season in Canada typically is in mid- to late-July.

On average Canada gets about 65 tornadoes per year historically, said Sills, though that figure is highly variable year to year. He said since the inception of the Northern Tornadoes Project in 2017, his team has detected on average 105 tornadoes annually across Canada.

Despite lower activity this summer thus far, that doesn't mean Manitobans can let their guard down, said Sills.

"The threat still exists. We have a threat kind of just east of the southern Manitoba area today, and we're expecting that there could be a tornado or two in northwestern Ontario," said Sills.

"But then the risk kind of goes back into southern Manitoba again for the next day. So, the storm season is not over and we certainly could see a number of of tornadoes happen in August across the Prairies."