Manitoba’s first confirmed tornado of the year marks early start to storm season

Manitoba’s first tornado of the year touched down near Kleefeld, marking the province’s earliest twister spotting since 1980.

With summer still weeks away, Manitoba has logged its first confirmed tornado of the year.

The Northern Tornadoes Project confirmed a weak tornado touched down late Wednesday near Tourond, Man., a community about 22 kilometres west of Steinbach.

The organization said analysis of witness-captured photos and video, radar, and storm environment indicates it was a landspout-type tornado.

“They tend to be weaker. They’re not associated with a rotating storm, and sometimes it’s just a garden variety storm. It’s kind of random conditions underneath the storm that can cause a spin up of a tornado,” said Dr. David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project.

By tornado standards, it was a weak one.

The project’s team categorized it as a EF0-Default, which means it had a wind speed of at least 90 km/h.

Sills said this one was quick, didn’t travel very far and fortunately, didn’t cause any damage.

Weak as it was, the landspout was notable.

The last confirmed April sighting of a tornado in Manitoba was back in 1980 in Altona – not too far from where Wednesday’s disturbance was reported.

“It’s not all that common to have a tornado in Manitoba this early in the season, and once you get into May, it really starts to ramp up,” Sills said.

‘It was rotating’

CTV News Winnipeg first heard about the weather disturbance earlier this week.

Lorissa Spence spotted what looked like a funnel cloud outside her Kleefeld, Man. home on Wednesday.

“I opened up my phone and took a look with the zoom camera, and then I could see that, yeah, it was rotating,” she said in a phone interview Thursday.

CTV News Winnipeg showed her photos and videos to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).

Based on that footage, warning preparedness meteorologist Natalie Hasell classified it as a cold core funnel cloud, which are created during non-severe thunderstorms when there’s enough general convection and enough pressure in the atmosphere to create rotation.

However, new videos of the funnel show it making landfall, which Hasell said upgraded it to a landspout.

These weak tornadoes are also created from the types of non-severe thunderstorms that unfolded in the area that day, she said.