Online Archive Digitizes Canada’s Tornado History from the 1700s Onwards
A history of tornadoes that have hit Canada for more than the past 200 years is now available to the public through a digitization project.
The Michael Newark Digitized Tornado Archive includes news clippings, photographs, investigation reports, and analysis that date back to Canada’s first recorded tornado in the Niagara region in 1792.
The project is named after a former meteorologist who spent a decade researching the topic of tornadoes in Canada.
Records from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) make up some of the digitized archive. The physical files are being kept by ECCC, according to the archive website.
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The archive “draws a direct line between past and present approaches to tornado research by providing invaluable historical context that compliments the ongoing work of the Northern Tornadoes Project,” she said.
Ontario tornado information has been uploaded, and work is underway to digitize other provinces’ records, the archive website says.
Michael Newark’s Life Work
Newark worked as a meteorologist with ECCC from 1959 until retiring in 1991.
He created the archive after being asked questions about a tornado that hit Windsor in 1974 and not knowing the answers. Newark expected to be able to find a published record, but discovered that “very little was known about tornadoes in Canada,” the archive website says.
For the next 10 years, he dedicated his time to researching the topic, and compiling the records that are included in the archive.
He was made an honorary fellow of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in 2019.
