Canada's first tornado of 2025 touches down in southern Alberta

An early season tornado touched down about 175 kilometres southeast of Calgary on Saturday.

It's the first tornado recorded in Canada in 2025, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

It was spotted in a farmer's field about 10 kilometres north of Rolling Hills, Alta.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and I was shocked to see a tornado so early in the spring," said Darby Lester, an area resident who saw the tornado from her farm, in a voicemail sent to CBC News. 

"No, I wasn't scared. It was far enough away and seemed pretty weak, and it wasn't getting any bigger."

Environment Canada has given it a preliminary rating of EF-0 — the weakest rating on the scale it uses to rate tornado intensity.

No damage has been reported as of Monday, according to agency meteorologist Justin Shelley, but the twister marks the earliest start to Alberta's tornado season since at least 1980.

"May, June, July and sometimes stretching into August is sort of the peak period for tornadoes," he said. 

But Shelley added that an early season tornado doesn't mean Alberta will see a particularly intense year for twisters, noting it "doesn't really point to what we can expect later."

Environment Canada is calling it a landspout tornado, usually caused by weak rotation under rapidly growing clouds or weak thunderstorms.

Landspout tornadoes are usually weaker than supercell tornadoes, according to the government agency, and can be whipped up by relatively benign conditions, but they can still topple trees, damage roofs or toss debris. 

A growing number of landspout tornadoes have occurred across southern Alberta in recent years, said Shelley.

The Northern Tornadoes Project, which tracks and investigates the damage tornadoes cause across the country, said landspouts typically don't travel far, and develop at the beginning stages of a thunderstorm.

"They're also very difficult to predict and to warn for, because they don't show up on radar," said Dave Sills, director of the organization.

"Typically, the only way we know that they happen is someone takes a photo or a video and shows us."

Researchers are getting better at forecasting the more dangerous supercell tornadoes, Stills said, but the conditions that create landspout tornadoes occur fairly randomly, and landspout tornadoes likely go underreported because they often don't cause much damage.

Still, every tornado is dangerous, and people should take cover if they spot one nearby, said Stills. 

"I get a little nervous with people seeing them and walking closer to them," he said.

"There's so many people that send us a video [saying] 'hey, I just saw this tornado.' And you can see they're taking the video as it's getting closer and closer to them, and they're not stopping."

Environment Canada is asking anyone with photos or videos of the tornado that occurred on Saturday, or any damage it caused, to post them online or send them in by email.

The Northern Tornadoes Project said no damage survey investigation is planned.