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No tornadoes Tuesday, just a lot of wind: Environment Canada

Jun 21, 2017 | 9:44 PM

It wasn’t a tornado. So what was it?

According to a Meteorologist Dan Kulak with Environment Canada, Tuesday night’s windstorm that blew a destructive path through Red Deer was just that, a windstorm.

“It was one of those summer severe weather ‘get used to it’ type of things,” Kulak said Wednesday.

“This is the type of weather that we get routinely, I think, in the summer time. Maybe not in the Red Deer area or any particular location, but thunderstorms with wind gusts like this will occur,” Kulak added.

It all started Tuesday afternoon when a series of strong thunderstorms formed on the northern foothills, dumping large hail as they moved toward the east. By the time they reached Red Deer, hail had given way to the damaging high-speed winds. By midnight, these storms had moved into southern Saskatchewan.

Wind speed Tuesday night in Red Deer reached a peak 111 km/h at 7:10 p.m.

One thing that does make Tuesday’s storm unique, Kulak said, is that it cut a swath all the way from Edmonton to southern Alberta.

“A wide-spread event like that is kind of unusual. By the time the winds from this cluster of thunderstorms that formed reached southern Alberta, there was really no cloud left on them, it was just strong winds with not a lot of convective activity no hail no rain,” he said.

The large area affected also helps to debunk the theory that a tornado had struck. While Environment Canada did issue a severe thunderstorm warning Tuesday night, they did not issue a tornado watch or warning.

Social media was buzzing Tuesday with word that Red Deer was said to be the second-windiest place on earth during the storm. However, Kulak blew cold air on that idea, saying it’s simply too difficult to verify such a claim.

“When winds affect populated areas we hear about them in the news and we talk about them 24 hours later. If these winds were to happen across the northern part of the province, where there’s not a lot of communities, we might have had less interest and less possibilities for damage,” he pointed out. “The terrain up there is a lot more trees than there is in the southern part of the province, so that affects the wind patterns as well that the winds are usually less in the trees than on the prairies.”