The Northern Tornadoes Project is reporting that the first Canadian tornado of 2024 touched down in the Amherstburg area.
The NTP reports a tornado hit Malden Centre on March 16, which ties the record for the earliest recorded Ontario tornado in Clifford, on March 16, 2016.
Engineering researcher for the Northern Tornadoes Project, Dr. Connell Miller, says you need heat in the atmosphere to be able to generate these tornadoes.
Miller says it had been an abnormally warm day for March when this tornado took place.
He says they received a report about a mobile home that had lost its roof.
"Our team went out and investigated, both on the ground and with the use of drones, and after that survey, we determined a very small EF1 tornado had hit the area. It only lasted for around a kilometre in length, so very, very short lived," he says.
According to the report, a storm damage survey was conducted on Saturday, April 13.
The survey found the roof had been removed from a well-anchored double-wide mobile home; there was shingle damage and a downed tree at another residence; and numerous pine and spruce trees were downed in a woodlot further along the track.
More tree damage would likely have occurred if the trees had been leafed out.
The damage assessed indicates it was an EF1 tornado, with an estimated maximum wind speed of 150 km/h, a track length of 1.10 km, and a maximum path width of 100 m.
Miller says if they had not received a report, they would not have known a tornado took place.
"When events happen this quickly, they can go; there's no signature on the radar for it to show that a tornado could have potentially occurred there. So we do rely a lot on people submitting reports to ourselves or to Environment Canada about this type of damage," he says.
Miller says this doesn't mean more tornadoes are on the way this summer.
"Tornadoes are so variable and so hard to predict and track. A tornado occurring in March isn't necessarily an indication that it's going to be a particularly bad storm year. It's just an indication that the storm season got off to an early start, at the very least," he says.
No tornado warning had been issued, and there were no reports of severe weather upstream in Michigan.
In Ontario, the storm also generated severe hail.