Despite the severity of the wind storm that blew through the Grand Forks and Christina Lake areas on Friday, it doesn’t look like it was a tornado.
“What happened on the weekend was a severe thunderstorm that developed south of the border and tracked north and the type of wind we have with that – from what I can tell from talking to other media that saw the aftermath – it sounded like it was a straight-line wind,” explained Doug Lundquist, a meteorologist for Environment Canada.
“Often in those kind of situations, it comes as a microburst. We have rain falling into fairly dry air at some layer in the atmosphere. It evaporates and cools the air, the cold air becomes really dense and it falls really quickly and it hits the ground and spreads out ahead of (a) thunderstorm or from the thunderstorm in very, very strong winds.”
Lundquist said there can be a lot of damage with the strong winds associated with those types of thunderstorms, adding it was most likely severe thunderstorms with microbursts on Friday afternoon.
