The Northern Tornadoes Project

The Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP), founded at Western University in 2017 with the support of social impact fund ImpactWX, aims to better detect tornado occurrence throughout Canada, improve severe and extreme weather understanding and prediction, mitigate against harm to people and property, and investigate future implications due to climate change.

Western University also partners with the University of Manitoba, Pelmorex's The Weather Network, Instant Weather and CatIQ, and closely collaborates with Environment and Climate Change Canada and several Canadian and international universities on this Project.

The Open Data site for Western's Northern Tornadoes Project is an access point for our tornado data (ground, drone, aerial and satellite surveys and related assessments) and statistics, event assessment tools and public reporting. The NTP Dashboard is another, map-based access point.

Non-commercial use of the data is permitted and encouraged. For commercial use, please contact us at [email protected].

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New! NTP and Western Libraries have officially launched the Michael Newark Digitized Tornado Archive with digital scans of physical files going back to Canada's first tornado in 1792, see here.

New! NTP has created an Advanced Dashboard to view new and revised Canadian tornado data from 1980 to 2023. For full details and instructions for getting access, see here.

New! NTP has made some minor revisions to the Canadian implementation of the EF scale to address issues with several damage indicators, and to specify how EF-scale ratings may be determined based on in-situ wind speed measurements. See the revised document here.

The latest NTP Annual Report covering the 2023 season can be found here.

The NTP team has published a new paper on the automation of treefall detection and analysis using machine learning - see here.

NTP's tornado warning performance assessment for Canada has been peer reviewed and published in Atmosphere-Ocean here.

NTP's assessment of wind speeds associated with the Alonsa, MB EF4 tornado has been peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics here.

You can visit our sister initiative - the Northern Hail Project (NHP) - here.

 
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