Ontario storms produced 'tremendous amount of lightning': storm chaser

Very significant rainfall and severe winds ripping through Stratford, Ontario, last night. Take a look. That is a car, of course, way in the distance there. A colossal storm sweeping through southern Ontario this morning. More than 50,000 homes and businesses still without power. Let's turn to Mark Robinson who was out in all of this. He's a meteorologist and storm chaser with the Weather Network and is this morning outside once again in Guelph, Ontario. How's it going, Mark? Oh, good. It's a little bit different today as compared to yesterday with the storms that swept through a good chunk of southern Ontario. I mean, you live and breathe this stuff, but when you were actually in it yesterday, saw some of your videos, you were just getting soaked and pummeled by winds, particularly in and around the Stratford area. Yeah, I mean, that storm, that was part of this whole storm system that went through. There were multiple rounds of storms, so the GTA got hit a couple of times, and I've seen some of the videos and some of the shots from Yorkdale. There was very large hail in Yorkdale, flooding everywhere, trees down everywhere, and that was just because of how much energy was in the atmosphere for these storms to sort of tap into and really get going. And we don't see storms quite this strong all the time in southern Ontario, but I think the big thing with this one was how much it hit. It just sort of hit everybody throughout the day. Some of that energy came out in the form of lightning. You captured this incredible footage around Toronto. Yeah, I mean, the storms yesterday were producing a tremendous amount of lightning, and that sort of wrapped up, and we were going to have a lot of lightning, and there was a tremendous amount of lightning, but yeah, the most dangerous part of the storm is the lightning. I would like to emphasize that one. Yeah, absolutely, and it was quite something. You know, I'm used to seeing one bolt of lightning, but this was right across the entire sky, reminiscent actually of the prairies, of the big storms that happen on the prairies where you can see huge amounts of lightning. Yeah, and that's just because with the prairies ones, you can see forever. In southern Ontario, we're often in trees, there's a lot of buildings, etc., but we once in a while will get storms definitely on that scale, and yesterday, the parameters that were there to produce storms on the level of like Oklahoma-type storms, and this is what made us very nervous at the Weather Network, and we were watching this one very closely, and I think, you know, we got kind of lucky that we didn't see long-track destructive tornadoes, but definitely areas of damage right across, I mean, Tavistock, Toronto, you know, the Stratford area, even here in Guelph, we saw, you know, trees down and power lines down. There is, as you talk about tornadoes, there is the possibility, I understand, that somewhere between Cambridge and Kitchener, there may have been a funnel cloud and an investigation now underway? Yeah, the Northern Tornadoes Project, my friend Dave Sills, Dr. Dave Sills, is going to be out sending out his research teams just to sort of assess whether or not there was damage. I even did an assessment near Tavistock yesterday, a bunch of trees down, like really big trees, and I thought, oh boy, and it actually turned out to be just straight line winds. That's how strong these winds were, 120, 130 kilometers an hour potentially. That is quite something when you feel the intensity of that. All right, looking at the last of the damage with you right now, roofs being ripped off, cars submerged, is there anything that ever sort of puzzles you about what you see when you see these storms of this intensity? Yeah, there's always something weird. Every storm is unique, and I have seen very, very strange things. I've been down in Oklahoma and seen a tornado quite literally remove half the house, and the other half of the house was intact, and the other half of it was just, there was nothing left. It was just right down to bare concrete. We've seen stuff like that even in southern Ontario. We've seen branches and bits and pieces of houses thrown in just incredibly far, and I'm looking at this quite often going, how did that manage to do that? I mean, it's the power of mother nature, and sometimes in southern Ontario, we get treated to a wide variety of the different powers of mother nature. Absolutely. Mark, we'll leave it there with you. Thanks so much. My pleasure.