The Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP), founded at Western University in 2017 with the support of social impact fund ImpactWX, aims to better detect tornado occurrence throughout Canada, improve severe and extreme weather understanding and prediction, mitigate against harm to people and property, and investigate future implications due to climate change.
Western University also partners with the University of Manitoba, Pelmorex's The Weather Network, Instant Weather and CatIQ, and closely collaborates with Environment and Climate Change Canada and several Canadian and international universities on this Project.
NTP actively works to develop new methods and tools to inform the field of severe storms research, and utilizes satellite, surveillance planes, drones and on-the-ground observation to capture and analyze tornado events and their damage.
Constantly striving to be a community endeavour, NTP believes it will take the combined efforts of the full severe weather community of scientists, emergency managers, storm enthusiasts and media outlets to ensure the project’s success across the country.
NTP began with a mission to find tornadoes in Northern Ontario in its 2017 pilot year, expanded Ontario-wide in 2018, and then Canada-wide in 2019. It is the most comprehensive analysis of tornadoes ever undertaken in Canada and seeks to have a national and international impact.
The NTP is committed to open data and open science. We are working to make our data available to the public as soon as possible after collection and processing. We are also working to make our data as accessible as possible to the public, including through the use of interactive maps and visualizations.
NTP survey data is available through the NTP Open Data site.