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Western University is launching a new national lab to study severe storms, a project made possible by a $20-million investment from a Toronto-based fund.
The Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory will be studying severe thunderstorms, damaging winds, hail and flash floods from coast-to-coast to improve early detection of severe weather. The data will also be used mitigate damage from future severe weather.
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“We want to cover all the hazards related to severe thunderstorms and have the lab be the authority for severe thunderstorm data and research in Canada,” said David Sills, executive director of Western’s Northern Tornadoes Project, an initiative that will continue under the Canadian Severe Storms Lab banner.
“It’ll be a hub where anybody can go and get all the information they need and all the datasets they need.”
The project is being supported by a $20-million investment from ImpactWX, a Toronto-based social impact fund that supports research on severe weather events. The funding will support the new lab over the next decade, Sills said.
“This extraordinary gift is truly one-of-kind in Canada,” the lab’s founding director Greg Kopp said in a statement on Monday. “The Canadian Severe Storms Lab will greatly improve severe and extreme weather detection and documentation across the country while mitigating harm to Canadians and their properties.”
Western is already home to the Northern Tornadoes Project, a program founded in 2017 to better detect tornado occurrence throughout Canada. ImpactWX is also a partner in this Western-led initiative.
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The Northern Tornadoes Project, and the related Northern Hail Project that began in 2022, will continue under the umbrella of the new lab, Sills said.
The establishment of the new lab will take Western’s existing expertise in tornado and hail research to a new level, Sills said.
“We started the Northern Tornadoes Project with the idea of learning more about tornadoes in Canada, but the endgame was always that we’d have a Canadian severe storms lab at the end of this. Now here we are,” he said.
The Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory is located in the Amit Chakma Engineering Building, near Western Road and Lambton Drive. It will move to the brand new Western Engineering Building, which is being built near Alumni Hall, when the building is complete in 2026.
The new lab will take up much of the top floor of the new building, Sills said.
The lab, which has a national focus, aligns with similar ones in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma attempts to improve lead time and accuracy of severe weather warnings and the European Severe Storms Laboratory in Austria detects and documents severe weather for Europe.
Over the next decade, the lab is planning to launch a program to study flash floods in Canada, an emerging area of severe storm research. A Western team was deployed to study the flooding in Toronto months ago.
“It’s one more hazard from severe thunderstorms,” Sills said. “A cluster of thunderstorms can result in quite a bit of rain over one area. . . . It can be very dangerous and a very expensive hazard.”
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