An average year for tornados in Alberta

Other than a Canada Day twister that went through the Didsbury region, it seems like it's been a quiet year for tornados.

Meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, Terri Lang, says although we didn't hear about a lot of them, they were happening.

"Alberta kind of started out with a real bang and came out of the gate real strong and also had the strongest tornado in Canada this year, then everything stopped. By the end of July, nobody got any more tornadoes anywhere in Alberta, through Saskatchewan, through to Manitoba."

She says post surveys, the Northern Tornado Project will go through high-resolution satellite imagery and sometimes can find tornados after the fact.

"So far this year there's been 18, which is well above the average of ten, however, ten of those were on one day on June 14th so that was a real banner day for tornados, if you take away that day you'd be pretty close to average, but it came out higher than average because of that."

Lang says the dry conditions have played a role in the number of twisters across Alberta.

"Most of the thunderstorms that form use moisture from the crops, it's called evapotranspiration, and give off a lot of moisture when they're growing, but because we were in drought conditions, especially across southern Alberta, that took away that whole moisture source and so I think that did play a role."

She says the wildfire smoke can also play a role in that it can suppress thunderstorm development and it can suppress temperatures although it was still very warm so that may have been less of a factor.

Lang says we just didn't see the same types of weather patterns this year that we normally see and that also affected the number of hail storms this year.

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