and a host of other emergencies<\/a> \u2014 advised people to shelter in their basements, even though a thunderstorm had already passed through Ottawa and the sky was beginning to clear.<\/p>\n“I just thought it was a bit dramatic,” said Mona Alhafez, who was at work in Barrhaven when the alert rang out, and said there were no signs of threatening weather at the time.<\/p>\n
Chris White said he appreciated getting the alert, but didn’t let it change his plans. <\/p>\n
“It’s a bit like an Amber Alert,” he explained. “It may not affect me directly, but I’m glad that people are cognizant of it because it’s going to affect somebody.”<\/p>\n
“I just dismissed it,” said Chris Ciliberto, who was picking up his daughter from daycare when the alert sounded on his phone. <\/p>\n
He said that while there was no obvious tornado threat, it’s better to be safe than sorry.<\/p>\n
“I can understand that they may move fast and they could be unpredictable.”<\/p>\n
‘The risk was real’<\/p>\n
Peter Kimbell, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, says it’s wise to be cautious, even if there’s no obvious threat.<\/p>\n
“The risk was real, because on radar there was a pretty strong indication of rotation,” Kimbell, told CBC’s Ottawa Morning.<\/p>\n
Environment Canada forecasters in Toronto are responsible for deciding when to transmit tornado warnings through the Alert Ready system. Kimbell said while they are expert at spotting twisters as they form, the technology can sometimes be slow to catch up, sometimes causing them to issue warnings to a wider area than absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n
“So maybe there\u2019s a bit of an overwarning going on now, but 20, 30, 40 years ago, we weren\u2019t even able to do that at all, and so the risk was that no one really got the warning,” he said.<\/p>\n
Kimbell said improvements to the current system are in the works.<\/p>\n
WATCH | Tornado hits Harrington, Que., near Mont-Tremblant :![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1784972300_842_default.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Likely tornado tears through Harrington, Que., leaves behind major damage<\/p>\n
Harrington, Que., is approximately 40 kilometres from Mont-Tremblant, with a population of under 1,000 people. The probable tornado hit Tuesday afternoon, resulting in downed power lines and outages in the small municipality and other parts of the Laurentians.An unpredictable threat<\/p>\n
The United States has moved to a more geo-targeted approach with its tornado warning system, but Bill Bunting, deputy director of the NOAA Storm Prediction Centre in Norman, Okla., said there’s no perfect approach.<\/p>\n
“The challenge is you don’t always know in advance what the characteristics of the tornado that might develop will be,” he said. “So there is inherent uncertainty in any warning, or even in a tornado watch that might precede it.”<\/p>\n
Because of their unpredictable nature, Bunting said a certain amount of “over-alerting” still occurs in the U.S., where they see an average of 1,300 tornados each year. <\/p>\n
A typical alert area there is between 40 to 65 kilometres long and 40 kilometres wide, Bunting said. <\/p>\n
He agreed that most people would rather be overwarned than taken by surprise.<\/p>\n
“For the most part, people understand some degree of false alarms if something happens somewhere else … but just happened to miss their area,” he said. <\/p>\n
“I think most people understand that any warning system for any type of threat is not perfect, but the key is to minimize false alarms and sometimes to explain … why the warning was issued.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 4 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":824975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-824974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/824975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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