Does Canada use the F scale or the EF scale?

Environment Canada moved to the Enhanced Fujita scale on 1 April 2013. Every tornado in this archive predates that, so every rating here is on the original Fujita scale, in the wind speeds ECCC publishes for it: F0 is 60 to 110 km/h and F5 is 420 to 510 km/h.

How many F5 tornadoes has Canada had?

One. The tornado that struck Elie, Manitoba on 22 June 2007 is the only Canadian tornado ever rated F5. It killed nobody.

Why do most Canadian tornadoes show a point rather than a track?

The database records where a tornado touched down for every event, but where it lifted for only a few hundred of them. Where there is no lift-off point the map shows the touchdown as a dot rather than drawing a line the survey never recorded.

Tornadoes

Tornadoes in Canada

1,839 tornadoes were verified in Canada in the thirty years from 1980 to 2009, an average of 61.3 a year. They killed 60 people and injured 887. 6 were rated F4 or above, one of them the F5 that hit Elie, Manitoba on 22 June 2007, the only F5 on record in Canada. The database ends in 2009, and the years since belong to a record this site cannot publish.

This record stops in 2009

Environment and Climate Change Canada verified tornadoes for the thirty years from 1980 to 2009 and has not extended that database. Nothing here after 2009 is missing because Canada stopped having tornadoes: the modern Canadian record is kept by Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project, which has surveyed every year since 2017 and confirms more tornadoes a year than this database averages, because it goes looking with satellite imagery and drones rather than waiting for a report.

We do not carry it. The Northern Tornadoes Project publishes its data under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence, which forbids use on a commercial site, and this is one. For the years from 2017 on, go to the project’s own open data.

The rating scale

Tracks are drawn in the color of the rating.

Every tornado in this record is rated on Ted Fujita’s F scale, which rates the damage and reads a wind speed off it. Canada moved to the Enhanced Fujita scale on 1 April 2013, four years after this record ends, so no EF rating appears here at all. Wind speeds are the F scale as Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes it, rounded to 10 km/h.

F060 to 110 km/h
Light damage. Surface peeled off some roofs, gutters and siding damaged, branches broken, shallow-rooted trees pushed over.
F1120 to 170 km/h
Moderate damage. Roofs badly stripped, mobile homes overturned or badly damaged, exterior doors lost, windows broken.
F2180 to 240 km/h
Considerable damage. Roofs torn off well-built houses, frame homes shifted on their foundations, large trees snapped or uprooted, cars lifted off the ground.
F3250 to 320 km/h
Severe damage. Whole stories of well-built houses destroyed, large buildings badly damaged, trains overturned, trees debarked, heavy cars lifted and thrown.
F4330 to 410 km/h
Devastating damage. Well-built houses leveled, structures with weak foundations moved some distance, cars thrown and large missiles generated.
F5420 to 510 km/h
Incredible damage. Strong frame houses swept off their foundations, car-sized missiles thrown more than 100 meters, steel-reinforced concrete badly damaged.
Unrated
The survey recorded a tornado but could not put a number on it, most often because nothing it passed carried a rating the scale can be read from.

By province or territory

Every province or territory with a tornado in the record. Each one has a page of its own, with every year and every tornado.

Province or territory	Tornadoes	Deaths	Injuries	Rated 2 and above
Saskatchewan	529		11	27
Alberta	456	40	439	24
Ontario	378	18	320	56
Manitoba	283	1	36	19
Quebec	142	1	81	23
New Brunswick	22			4
British Columbia	15			4
Newfoundland and Labrador	6
Nova Scotia	4
Prince Edward Island	4

The deadliest

The strongest

The longest paths

The widest

The costliest

Property damage as the record has it, in the Canadian dollars of the year it happened, not adjusted for inflation.

Every year

Nearby

Warnings in force in Canada now The forecast in Canada The live radar over Canada

What this means

Ratings are the survey’s, read off the damage rather than measured, on the Fujita scale as Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes it. Path length, width, time, casualties and cost are blank in the source for many tornadoes, and a blank here is a blank there rather than a zero. The rating scale is above.

Sources

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Canada.Source: Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canadian National Tornado Database: Verified Events (1980-2009).The tables, totals, rankings and wording on this page are WeatherOverTime’s, built from that database.

What is here

The record: The Canadian National Tornado Database: Verified Events, 1980 to 2009, published by Environment and Climate Change Canada under the Open Government Licence. 1,839 tornadoes, one page each, with index pages by province and by year.
Where it stops: In 2009. Canada's modern tornado record belongs to Western University's Northern Tornadoes Project, whose open data is licensed for non-commercial use, so it is not here. Every page on this archive says so rather than leaving the later years looking quiet.
The scale: The Fujita scale in the wind speeds Environment Canada publishes for it, in kilometers an hour. Canada adopted the Enhanced Fujita scale in 2013, after this record ends, so no EF rating appears here.

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2000s

1990s

1980s

What is here