Environment Canada has confirmed that a tornado touched down in southeast Saskatchewan on Tuesday.
It happened just west of Estevan at roughly 5 p.m., according to meteorologist Alysa Pederson.
“We didn’t have any damage… If anybody does have any photos of the tornado or any damage that it might have caused, if they could forward that to Environment Canada,” she said on Wednesday.
“We’re still doing investigation and collecting data from that event.”
On the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale, Environment Canada has been given Tuesday’s tornado a preliminary rating of EF-0.
“We use the (EF) scale to rate tornadoes and basically that’s rating the damage that tornadoes cause… the scale goes up to a five. We’ve only ever had one EF-5 in Canada and that was in Elie, Man., in 2007. Generally, most of the tornadoes that we see on the Prairies here are typically EF-0 to EF-2,” Pederson said.
“What we’re looking at for EF-0 is generally wind speeds of 90 to 130 km/h … our severe wind criteria is 90 km/h and that’s kind of what we expect the lowest rating to have as the minimum.”
Pederson said this is Saskatchewan’s fifth tornado of 2020 so far.
“Generally, it’s somewhere around like … 10 per year so we are a little bit lower than average in Saskatchewan this year so far,” she said.
“(Saskatchewan) can see tornadoes and storms that produce tornadoes anytime between, generally, like late May all the way through to September. The peak season though is pretty much like the end of June towards kind of when harvest is — mid-August.”
Estevan is roughly 195 km southeast of Regina.
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