August 20 Tornadoes in Canada

Yesterday’s storms marched across West Michigan pretty uneventfully, but as they moved east, they grew fangs. Moving into better helicity and shear, they began to develop supercellular characteristics from around Saginaw down into Ohio. It was interesting to track them on the radar, but I had no idea what was coming as they moved into Canada.

KDTX showed some small but nicely shaped and very suspect-looking cells moving out over Lake Huron. Evidently a few of them meant business. Tornadoes began dropping in Ontario, with the area around Toronto getting slammed, and with one fatality recorded in the town of Durham.

Here’s a video of the strong tornado that hit Vaughan, just north of Toronto. Looks like the person who posted on YouTube lifted the footage off of the news. I looked for other footage, but while there’s plenty out there, much of it isn’t of very good quality. This is some of the best I could find. There is presently one pretty dramatic, close-range clip of the Durham tornado which a young woman shot with the video cam on her cell phone, but I’m not confident that the link will last very long. Maybe this one won’t either, but I’m crossing my fingers and hoping it does.