Manitoba's 1st tornado of 2025 recorded southeast of Niverville

Tornado season started in Manitoba this week with the first one touching down just southeast of Niverville, says an Ontario lab that tracks all tornadoes in Canada.

It was weak but it's still "a bona fide tornado," said David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project, based at Western University in London, Ont.

Officially, the Northern Tornadoes Project classifies it as a landspout-type tornado, which means its rotation couldn't be detected on satellite radar.

It occurred around 5 p.m., about eight kilometres southeast of Niverville (about 35 kilometres south of Winnipeg) over a bare farm field. Soil from the field gently rotated in the spout.

The tornadoes project received numerous reports from Manitoba with video and photos from multiple angles, Sills said.

"Apparently the visibility was very good, because people were seeing it from miles away — lots of eyes on that one," he said.

"Thankfully it just was brief. It didn't go very far."

The tornadoes project will study high-resolution satellite imagery to get an estimate of the distance the tornado travelled.

"Someone that was on the ground and was close by gave us an estimated track, so we'll be using that to look for evidence," Sills said. "Once we have a track, we can include that with the data on our dashboard."

The tornado was given a default rating on the enhanced Fujita scale of EF-0. That means there was no significant damage and wind speeds, though weaker, were at least 90 kilometres per hour.

"You can't really see that kind of rotation on radar, so that's why we call these landspout-type tornadoes," Sills said.

"When we start getting into more severe storms … those are the kind where you can actually see the storm itself rotating, and that can get picked up on radar, and forecasters can use that to help forecast the onset of the tornado."

Landspout tornadoes aren't easy to forecast because they are "more or less randomly occurring around thunderstorms," he said. "And the most you'll usually get is an EF-2, but most of them are EF-0 or EF-1."

Environment Canada warning preparedness meteorologist Natalie Hassell said the national weather agency agrees with the tornadoes project researchers that an EF-0 tornado touched down.

It might not have been spawned from the storms in the area, which were quite small, she said. It appears the funnel cloud, which turned into the landspout, just formed from a low pressure system and cold front.

"Both of these things would certainly be enough to start the vertical motion," she said.

"In this case, the rotating column was visible as cloud formed in it, so we could actually see a funnel cloud and then see that it touched the ground."

The first tornado of the year in Canada occurred April 12 north of Rolling Hills, Alta. It is also listed as an EF-0. The tornadoes project is also investigating a potential one in Quebec from storms on the 29th.

"So this one [in Manitoba] would actually be the third tornado documented in Canada this season," Sill said.

"This is the time of year where the ingredients start to come together for tornadoes. Thankfully they've all been weak so far, nothing really substantial."

But southern Manitoba is about to head straight into a sudden onset of summer-like weather, with temperatures of 25 C to 28 C forecast starting on Saturday.

"It's those warm air masses that can lead to thunderstorms and potentially tornadoes if if the conditions are right," Sills said.

"So this is the time of year when everybody needs to be more vigilant about watches and warnings and keeping an eye out when those are issued to make sure you stay out of trouble."

The average number of tornadoes document in Manitoba per year, based on a 30-year average, is 8½. Saskatchewan, by comparison, sees 14½, and Ontario gets 18½. 

Canada's largest recorded tornado in history, however, occurred in Manitoba during the evening of June 22, 2007. The Elie tornado carried wind speeds estimated at between 420 km/h and 510 km/h and lasted about 40 minutes.

It travelled about six kilometres, mostly through fields, but caused significant damage in the community of Elie, about 45 kilometres west of Winnipeg.

It remains the only F-5 tornado ever recorded in Canada on the Fujita scale, a system devised to measure the strength of a tornado that has since been replaced with the enhanced Fujita, or EF, scale.