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Santa finally received my letter for storms! We had three days of storms, a friend of mine and I were able to chase on Boxing Day. |
A few main features dominated the situation for Southeast Queensland, a nice inland heat associated trough was lying just inland with an upper level cold pool moving through western NSW and into NW NSW. This allowed for general cool air aloft to drift northwards towards the NSW and QLD borders. This associated with a general northerly flow ahead of a slow moving trough would mean that the atmosphere would be quite unstable! However a monsoonal low was situated just south of the Gulf of Carpenteria, and as the upper level cold pool pushed through towards SW QLD, it created the dreaded NW’ly jet ahead of it, which tapped into the moisture from the tropics and brought it streaming down towards SE QLD. Santa had gotten my thunderstorm letter, but he had left out the dry air in the upper levels!
The first day was always going to be the best being Christmas Day! I was able to escape Christmas lunch for twenty minutes to check on the animals back home, and also to check the sky. I saw a very impressive thunderstorm that was down near Beaudesert. At this stage it had very explosive development on its back end, and was nicely into the red on radar. However it very quickly collapsed about thirty minutes later, and everything after that was rather pulsey. A nice line of storms did develop to the north of Brisbane though on nightfall. There was a fair bit of upper level moisture already present, however it wasn’t too bad. Temperatures reached into the low 30’s today and DP’s were in the low 20’s.
The next day (Boxing Day) I had organised to chase with Jason Rainforest. There was a lot of upper level cloud streaming in now, but it was still going to get quite warm (low 30’s), and we had thought that storms should develop wherever there was a clearing or on the ranges later that afternoon.
We headed out towards Boonah at first, there was some nice CJ’s around but nothing significant. We then decided to go to the Cunningham Lookout to try and get a view of everything and sit and wait for something significant to develop.
 
We watched CJ’s go up and down, until something to our north over the Mt Walker region got itself better organised. Eventually we heard our first rumble of thunder, and soon after we were seeing CG’s from it! It was moving approximately SE, so we decided to head east to get in front of it and watch it.
It produced a weak arcus region on its front end, and then soon started to produce infrequent but spectacular CG’s on its RFB! Unfortunately the capture card I have decided it didn’t want to be nice and I was only able to capture one out of a couple. But still, on the video you can see the streamers very clearly and they look impressive. Most of the CG’s were within 2-3km and gave nice claps of thunder.
 
 
We saw quite a few nice showers around that had rain feet, a dry layer had came in just aloft above 950mb and it appeared that a few cells were giving weak dry microbursts. We continued further SE as we followed the storm. It eventually produced some rather nice outflow features!
 
However many were short lived, and eventually we were running out of road options and the storm was starting to become rain dominated so after some information from Matthew Pearce we decided to head east to see if we could intercept another line of storms. However these storms were fast turning into rain, and although we did see one nice storm feature, the rest was generally rain and the occasional impressive bolt of lightning.
We headed back to Jason’s place, watched radar for a bit and then decided that it was over – rain would dominate for the rest of the evening.
Today was “fun” but it was a shame that the upper level moisture ruined it all. The next day was nearly a total washout, with storms forming and turning into rain quickly. I did however see two CG’s while heading south from my parents’ farm to meet up with a good friend of mine (Tony Middleton) who had come up to visit for a couple of days! One of the CG’s actually took out a mobile tower at Aratula temporarily!!! On the way back to the farm, I had to try and remove a tree off the road that had come down during a small landslide over the road due to the heavy rain. After a long time of huffing and puffing trying to shift it off the road, another person also came by and he assisted in my cause trying to remove the tree totally off the road!
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