Marc-André Bourgeois-Gaudet was in his boat off the coast of Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Que., last Friday when he saw several funnel clouds descending from the sky like tornadoes.
As he got closer, the rain began to fall harder than anything he had ever experienced, he said. “It was like a waterfall fell on my head.”
The Northern Tornadoes Project, based at Western University, has confirmed that a number of waterspouts – also known as waterborne tornadoes – have occurred in Quebec and Nova Scotia in recent days.
Both Îles-de-la-Madeleine and Inverness, N.S., reported the weather phenomenon on Aug. 23, while another formed two days later over the Lake of Two Mountains near Vaudreuil, Que., west of Montreal. There were also some in Ontario in August, most of them in the Great Lakes region.
David Sills, executive director of The Northern Tornadoes Project, said a waterspout is simply a tornado that forms over water rather than land.
“A tornado is a rotating column of air that extends from the lower part of the storm cloud to the surface, and the surface can be land or water,” he said.
The Northern Tornadoes Project has confirmed that several waterspouts were recorded in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia during the month of August. Two waterspouts form in the distance while a barrel can be seen in the foreground in the waters off Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Que., in a Friday, Aug. 23 handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Marc-Andre Bourgeois-Gaudet.
GAC
Waterspouts have been in the news in recent weeks since a superyacht sank during a storm off the coast of Sicily last week, killing seven people. Italian civil protection officials said the storm may have caused a waterspout at the exact spot where the British-flagged Bayesian was moored.
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While a waterspout can cause damage if it directly hits a boat, Sill says most are far less destructive than their land-based counterparts. He said most have winds between 60 and 80 miles per hour — weak by tornado standards — and are rated EF-0.
Because cooler air over lakes tends to suppress thunderstorms, “it’s more the exception than the rule to have a strong tornado come off a lake,” he said. It does happen, though, including when a tornado formed as a waterspout over Lake Huron in 2011 before hitting Goderich, Ontario, like a devastating F3.
Waterspouts can “certainly sink a boat,” but most are slow enough to avoid, he said.
Bourgeois-Gaudet, from Îles-de-la-Madeleine, said he never really felt in danger during his encounter with the waterspout. He said although the water was a bit choppy, the wind was never high enough to risk capsizing. “The hardest part was seeing where I was going” because of the rain.
Sills said members have documented about 15 waterspouts per year since the tornado project started in 2017. There have already been 18 confirmed or suspected events this year, which is slightly above average so far this year, he said.
The waterspouts in Quebec attracted a lot of attention – probably because they are not reported as often as in the Great Lakes region. Sills said some of Quebec’s waterspouts this year are the first documented along the St. Lawrence River since 2017 — but that’s likely just because more people are seeing and documenting them, often on social media.
“Circumstances can certainly occur there,” he said, adding: “I wouldn’t say it’s rare, it’s just not well documented.”
He said that, thanks to improved reporting, the number of documented tornadoes in Canada has increased from about 60 per year before 2017 to an average of almost 100.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
