I hope everyone has been enjoying the amazing start to the month of March. The warm, sunny weather is a prelude to what we will be seeing a lot more often by late April. The return of warm and humid weather in April will also herald the start of the spring/summer severe weather season in Ontario. This severe weather will take the form of powerful thunderstorms capable of producing damaging winds, flooding rains, large hail and tornadoes. The 2009 season had a number of significant events. On July 9th three American tourists lost their lives in a fishing camp in Northwestern Ontario north of Dryden when a Fujita Scale 2 tornado moved through the camp. On August 20th, 18 tornadoes were spawned from a series of supercell thunderstorms that moved over southcentral and eastern Ontario. These 18 tornadoes represented a new Canadian record for most tornadoes in one day. Yet another milestone will be reached this spring, May 31st, 2010 will be the 25th anniversary of the Barrie and Grand Valley tornadoes…the last confirmed Fujita Scale 4 tornadoes to occur in Ontario…that, between them, took 11 lives.

CANWARN volunteer storm spotters continue to play an integral role in Environment Canada's severe weather watch/warning program. I would encourage you to come out to a training session near you especially if you haven't been to one in a few years. By now, most of you have received your CANWARN ID card…many were given out during last year's training then a number of others were mailed out. There will be a supply of cards at each training session for those of you who don't have a card yet. In order to keep our database up-to-date, I would ask you to send in any changes to your contact information (i.e. new email address, mailing address, phone number etc..) to the canwarn.ontarioregion@ec.gc.ca account. Also, I would appreciate getting emails to the canwarn.ontarioregion@ec.gc.ca account indicating which CANWARN training session you intend to participate in…this will help us get a sense of numbers ahead of time. During the sessions this year we will also be promoting two email addresses that can be used to report severe weather…they are storm.ontario@ec.gc.ca and tempete.ontario@ec.gc.ca, these accounts are monitored 24/7 by weather centre staff and represent yet another way you can provide information concerning breaking weather.

On behalf of my colleagues at the Ontario Storm Prediction Centre, I would like to thank all of you for being a part of this very important program. Your timely reports of severe weather are greatly appreciated and help in increasing the safety and security of the people of Ontario. I look forward to seeing some of you at the training sessions this year. So without further ado…here are the list of this year's sessions as things stand now…I will be sending updates out in the coming weeks as other dates/venues are firmed up.