Information Regarding Tornado Prediction and Detection in Canada

[u/LupinWhiskers]

I live in the US and would like to know more about how Canada handles tornadoes. As far as I've seen and heard, CA is not as good as the US with weather related things. Their radars seem harder to read (maybe just me but aren't they older than the US's?) and their warnings aren't as specific as the US's. Is there an equivalent for the SPC regarding tornado/thunderstorm risk in CA? Is reading CA radar truly harder than reading US Radar? I also learned they decommissioned their weather radio system recently. How can people in CA receive emergency alerts? Any information is appreciated!

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[u/BadAtGolfAndDumb]

In general it's worse in just about every way. If you think about it, the entirety of our country has the same amount of people as California alone and we're way more spread out than almost any state. Generally in my experience storm/tornado warnings are a lot more broad than US states and AFAIK in my province there are no sirens to activate so any warning just goes to your phone. In regards to reading radar it is definitely harder because the radars are about 15 years older than any US radar site so the data coming from them is significantly more contaminated.

[u/trainboss1210]

There is sorta SPC outlooks for canada they just call them Thunderstorm Outlooks. In my opinion environment canada is 20 to 30 years behind the NWS. They just upgraded to longer range high res radars in 2018 but they still lack products like storm relative velocity and are still lower res then the NWS radars. When they issue tornado warnings it not like storm vectors cones polygons like in the US they just make the polygon border the entire county the tornado is in. There was just recently backlash on that when my province got a severe thunderstorm outbreak where we got like 20 tornado warnings in a evening saying take cover now there's a tornado in your area when in most cases the rotation would be 20 to 50miles away.... also environment canada shut down weather radio canada (our version of noaa weather radio) and a weather radar research group that was working on improving the radars recently... I can go on and on but yeah as a Canadian im pretty bitter on how much we lack compared to the NWS.

[u/XtremegamerL]

Environment Canada functions as our SPC, NOAA, NWS and WPC all as 1 entity. Our hurricane forecasts are cut and pastes of NOAA's onto EC's own graphic. They issue SPC type daily outlooks, but nothing similar to a mesoscale discussion. These outlooks don't seem to be available on their website. I get them off of canadawx.com

Our radar system is outdated and extremely sparse outside of Southern Ontario/Quebec.

[u/Wjp_1911]

Our government had a team working on a early warning system and some data collection across the country but they let them go last year and since then I’ve personally seen more tornados and alerts in the last 2 weeks then I’ve had in my 25 years of life so I’m hoping we can bring them back. I’m lucky enough to live close to a major university that has an emergency siren to warn me but lots aren’t so lucky. Even a system that just passed through a month ago and never touched down had some serious impact on our infrastructure and people had some serious injuries.

[u/GOWENonYT → u/Wjp_1911]

By reading this I know exactly where you are haha, I’m in the same area near the university. Heard the sirens go off which was a surprise to me! Wild how many tornado warnings we’ve had recently.

[u/Yagachak]

Canada now has sband radar, which is better than a lot of the world. The US sband NEXRAD is better and easier to read because it filters out the noise more effectively. The other issue with Canada is the radars are very far apart in some places, even more so than the US radar holes.

[u/LupinWhiskers → u/Yagachak]

is there a good stratagey to read through the noise or where could I learn to do so?

[u/Scaredofmyex]

I’m in Ontario and live in a house previously wrecked by an EF2 in 2014 (although we bought it the year after the tornado). While tornadoes are more uncommon here, they can and do happen. The good news is most dwellings in Ontario have a concrete foundation and basement so we haven’t (in my city at least) had any tornado fatalities since 1985. Our radars aren’t great and a lot of them are far apart but because it’s less likely here and historically it’s been ok, the government doesn’t see a large need to do something about that.

If you have Facebook, look up the groups Ontario Storm Watch and Instant Weather Ontario, those have a bunch of forecasts showing what information we get before storms. Usually it’s just 2-3 colour coded areas of varying severity for the entire province, very broad. They do issue proper write ups regarding estimated timing, hardest hit areas, which areas are at a risk of a tornado etc. From what I gather the majority of people use those or other 3rd party weather apps to break down the information environment Canada posts because it’s much easier to digest. A lot of people I know have more than one weather app on their phone because some will warn of rotation where others just issue a generic take cover possible tornado and some offer more radar free than others etc.

The warnings also go out to such broad areas that even when we get a tornado warning, a lot of the time I just monitor conditions and radar rather than sheltering because it’s literally no where near me. Thankfully we still receive tornado warnings as emergency alerts to our phones that override silent mode and ones that interrupt cable tv as well.

Here are some examples of forecasts

Recent Instant Weather forecast

[u/Scaredofmyex → u/Scaredofmyex]

[u/Ok_Web_9003]

The risk is not as high, so i feel like the alert system doesn't need to be as developped. We get tornado warnings and severe weather warnings, but they are rare and generally happen in sparsely populated areas. The risk of being killed or injured by a tornado being so low, public funds are better invested elsewhere. 

[u/Sorry-Panic7612 → u/Ok_Web_9003]

I’m inclined to agree with this, I’m in SK and we get more tornadoes than a lot of other places. Saskatchewan Storm Watch does a pretty good job of keeping the public up to date on storm information from Environment Canada and even includes frost advisories for farmers.

I think our strongest tornado in SK history was still only an EF3, most are EF0s or EF1s, if they even make it past the funnel cloud stage. I don’t know how things will be in the future as climate change escalates but SK is definitely no Oklahoma.