Following a week of weather anomalies in southeastern Manitoba, it should come as no surprise that there have been a few tornado sightings.
On May 16, Environment and Climate Change Canada received reports of three funnel clouds spotted near Sperling, Gretna, and Niverville. At this time, they are still investigating whether any of them touched down.
Leah Brandt lives on Wyndham Court in Niverville. On Thursday night, she found herself watching at the window as the southern sky filled rapidly with a system of dark, turbulent clouds.
“I saw on some weather Facebook pages that there was some rotation in the sky,” Brandt says. “We were looking to the south for a while and then we didn’t see anything.”
Brandt and her three small kids then moved to a spot where the northern sky was more visible—and that’s when she spotted it.
She had just told her son that she’d always wanted to witness a funnel cloud and then there, at the edge of the cloud system, a finger-like funnel appeared for a short time before it disappeared.
“We moved here a year and a half ago from Winnipeg,” Brandt says. “We just couldn’t see the skies where we lived. Now we face the south, [which is] a field, and we can just see so much sky.”
As of early Friday morning, Environment and Climate Change Canada had yet to receive any reports of injuries or damages caused by tornadoes.
This is the second such tornado spotting near Niverville this month. The first occurred on May 1 about eight kilometres southeast of Niverville, touching down in a farmer’s field.
The rain from Thursday’s weather system provided much-needed relief after extreme temperatures and windstorms blasted the region earlier in the week.
An unofficial report says that Niverville received approximately 35 millimetres of rain overnight. Other areas, like Morden and Winnipeg, saw more than double that amount of precipitation.
According to Environment Canada, the next few days are expected to be chilly with overnight temperatures dipping to near zero. Next week, seasonal temperatures should return.