Two tornadoes touched down in region on July 24

Turns out Saturday's rain wasn't just a bad storm.

Researchers at Western University's Northern Tornadoes Project have confirmed two tornadoes touched down in Windsor and Leamington Saturday night.

“We knew there were very strong storms in the area and there were tornadoes confirmed in Michigan the same day,” said David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project. “We knew it was a day with tornado potential.”

The tornadoes detected in Windsor and Leamington were fairly weak. Windsor's was an EF0 rating with a maximum wind speed of 125 kilometres per hour, the weakest possible, while Leamington's was a slightly stronger EF1 with maximum wind speeds of about 145 km/h.

Damage to trees, as well as several greenhouses, was reported in Leamington.

The North Tornadoes Project was started in 2017 in a partnership between Western University and Impactwx to track tornadoes across the country.

Sills said until the project, most tornadoes were reported in urban areas — but actually, tornadoes happened about twice as often as verified.

As the project has progressed — in 2019 the project collected data for all of Canada for the first time — the number of tornadoes verified has increased.

But that's partly because researchers are looking, and partly because social media makes it easier for anyone to snap a picture, Sills said.

There have been 43 investigated and verified tornadoes in Canada this year, Northern Tornadoes Project research shows.

To verify a tornado, Sills said they look for long but narrow strips of damage, unlike a wind storm where damage will be broad. Damage from Saturday's tornadoes in Leamington and Windsor spread over about two to 2.5 km, between 190 and 350 metres wide in each case.

“We can see that in damage, with a ground survey, or we can use high resolution satellite imagery to look in places we can't get to, like in forests of northern Ontario,” Sills said.

Because Leamington's tornado was slightly stronger, Sills said researchers could actually see debris on radar images, and damage found on the ground was a bit more severe.

The Northern Tornadoes Project uses crowd sourcing to find damage, and often sends a survey team to record damage. They rely on crowdsourcing, and people can send in photos of tornado-like sightings and damage following severe storms to ntp@uwo.ca.

If there's a tornado warning or watch declared, people should stay indoors, away from windows and preferably in a basement. Outside, remain low in your car, or get low to the ground. Injuries from tornadoes like Saturday's are very uncommon, Sills said, but it can happen.

“There are trees falling, sometimes debris flying, there's a lot of wind involved and if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time its possible to be injured for sure,” Sills said.

While tornadoes are sometimes quite visible and distinctive, at other times — Saturday included — they're tricky to spot because of intense rain and darkness.

“They are tricky, buried in the rain and getting dark ... we call them rain-wrapped tornadoes,” Sills said. “Tornadoes in the dark, you can't see them coming. Fortunately, in this case they were fairly weak, so it wasn't as big a deal as it could have been.”