(Montreal) Marc-André Bourgeois-Gaudet was in his boat off the coast of the Magdalen Islands last Friday when he saw several funnel clouds descend from the sky like tornadoes.
As he approached, the rain began to fall harder than anything he had ever seen. “It was like a waterfall falling on my head,” he said.
The Northern Tornadoes Project, based at Western University, has confirmed that a number of waterspouts – also known as tornadoes over water – have occurred in recent days in Quebec and Nova Scotia.
The Magdalen Islands and Inverness, Nova Scotia, reported the weather phenomenon on August 23, while another formed over Lake of Two Mountains near Vaudreuil, west of Montreal, two days later. There were also a number of them in Ontario in August, most of them in the Great Lakes region.
David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project, explained that a waterspout is simply a tornado that forms over water rather than on land.
“A tornado is a rotating column of air that extends from the bottom of the thundercloud to the surface. This surface can be either land or water,” he said.
Impressive, but less dangerous
Waterspouts have been in the headlines since a superyacht sank in a storm off Sicily last week, killing seven people. Italian civil protection officials have speculated that the storm may have caused a waterspout at the exact location where the Bayesian flying the British flag was moored.
While a waterspout can cause damage if it directly hits a boat, Sills said most are much less destructive than land-based tornadoes. He explained that most have wind speeds between 90 and 130 kilometres per hour — low by tornado standards — and are rated EF-0.
Because cooler air over lakes tends to reduce thunderstorm activity, “it’s more the exception than the rule that a strong tornado will come out of a lake,” he said. It’s not impossible, though, as when a tornado formed as a waterspout over Lake Huron in 2011 and hit Goderich, Ont., with a destructive F3 force.
Waterspouts can “certainly sink a boat,” but most move slowly enough that they can be avoided, the director said.
Mr. Bourgeois-Gaudet, from the Magdalen Islands, testified that he never really felt in danger during his close encounter with the waterspout. He added that even though the water was a little rough, the wind was never strong enough to risk capsizing. “The hardest part was seeing where I was going” because of the rain, he said.
Little or poorly documented in Quebec
Sills said that since the tornado project began in 2017, its members have documented about 15 waterspouts per year. This year, there have already been 18 confirmed or suspected events, making this year slightly above average so far.
Waterspouts in Quebec have attracted a lot of attention, probably because they are not reported as frequently as in the Great Lakes region.
Sills said some of this year’s Quebec waterspouts are the first to be documented along the St. Lawrence River since 2017, but that’s likely only because more people are seeing and documenting them, often on social media.
“These conditions can certainly occur there,” he observed. “I wouldn’t say it’s rare, just poorly documented.”
He added that because of improved reporting, the number of documented tornadoes in Canada has increased from about 60 per year before 2017 to nearly 100 on average.