After months of smashing weather record after weather record due to our bizarrely warm conditions, Ontario just almost surpassed its existing bar for the earliest tornado of the year, matching the record date exactly.

The twister, which was the first of 2024 in Canada, took place on Saturday, March 16, in Malden Centre — a small community near Windsor, some four hours away from Toronto.

With wind speeds of up to 150 km/h, the phenomenon was classified as an EF-1 tornado, which knocked down several local trees, damaged one roof, and tore off another.

Turns out the first Canadian tornado of 2024 occurred on March 16th at Malden Centre in SW ON. After an NTP ground / drone investigation, the tornado has been rated EF1 given it ripped the roof off a mobile home.

Full details at the NTP blog: https://t.co/0M8q1UcLTa #ONStorm pic.twitter.com/CXnYypLict

— Northern Tornadoes Project 🇨🇦 (@westernuNTP) April 15, 2024

The event, first reported by Western University's Northern Tornadoes Project, was witnessed as "an area of tight rotation" on Doppler radar at Detroit Metro Airport and is thought to be caused by the complex of thunderstorms moving through the province at the time (deemed a Quasi-Linear Convective System tornado).

The system touched down at around 7:25 p.m. and, thankfully, only had a short path length of 1.1 km.

As noted by NTP, previous to this, the earliest tornado of the year ever recorded in the province was on the same date in 2016 in Clifford, Ontario, which is far further northeast between Kitchener and Owen Sound.