A landspout tornado touched down in southern Alberta near Rolling Hills on Saturday, marking the first confirmed tornado in Canada so far this year, according to Environment Canada. Rolling Hills is located about 250 kilometres southeast of Airdrie.
"It occurred at about 5:20 p.m. local time," said Eric Van Lochem, operational meteorologist with Environment Canada. "Didn't cause anything in the way of damage, as far as we can tell at this time. So it will likely be on the low end of the Enhanced Fujita scale … this will probably be in that EF0 range."
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"It was a landspout tornado. This was the first recorded tornado in 2025, not just in Alberta but for all of Canada," Van Lochem said.
Unlike the long-tracking supercell tornadoes that produce widespread damage, landspouts are typically shorter-lived and less intense.
"They don't last as long as supercell tornadoes," he said. "Five to 10 minutes at the most. Sometimes, they can go a bit longer than that, but they're usually pretty brief. They don't track a very long distance and have this sort of dusty appearance to them, unlike a large cloud formation on the ground."
Van Lochem contrasted Saturday's landspout with the EF4 tornado that hit near Didsbury and Carstairs two summers ago.
"That one was rated EF4, which makes it the strongest tornado to hit Alberta since the Edmonton tornado in 1987," he said.
Tornadoes in Alberta during April are rare but not unprecedented, Van Lochem said.
"Since 1980, there have been 10 tornadoes in Alberta," he said. "So they occur roughly every three to five years."
"We had one at the end of April last year, just north of Calgary. Before that, there was one near Peers to the west of Edmonton in 2019, and then before that, there was one near Calgary in 2016."
Van Lochem said the safest response to a tornado, regardless of type, is to take shelter immediately.
"If there's a tornado approaching … get underground, so to a basement or storm shelter," he said. "Somewhere where you're not exposed to what's flying around and away from windows."
Looking ahead to the rest of the spring and summer, Van Lochem said there are no tools that allow meteorologists to reliably predict how active the tornado season might be.
"It's not something we have any models to forecast," he said. "And even if we did, it would be very difficult to do that because there's a lot of factors that go into creating a tornado."
He said surface moisture can contribute to storm development, but it's not a reliable predictor.
"When you get moisture evaporating from things like crops and vegetation, that can be more favourable for thunderstorm development," Van Lochem said. "But it's hard to draw a perfect correlation between moisture and more tornadoes, per se."
"All that said … it'd be very hard to say at this point if this summer will be more active than the last one or the summer before that. It's … kind of a shot in the dark, if you will."
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