Brisbane's most damaging thunderstorm in 23 years - damage in the hundreds of millions...

*** Technical Report to Come Soon ***

We were a little tired from the day before but headed out towards Beaudesert and eventually Boonah.  We sat there for a while and watched a storm to our SE boil away quite nicely.  It was hard to know what to do, it always showed good development on its western edge – however it seemed to make a slide E then push N and so forth, a slide east would mean it’d just go right over the southern part of the Gold Coast.  In hindsight, we should have headed to Beaudesert just in case, but we didn’t until at the last minute.

We shot eastwards and in Beaudesert we got some strong outflow from the storm – plenty of raised dust too!  We shot northwards and saw some great congestus developing on the outflow boundary of the storm.  The main supercell caused a lot of damage over Canungra and over the northern parts of the Gold Coast before weakening as it moved out to sea.  We got back into Brisbane with a nice guster and a large line of updrafts behind us. 

We decided to shoot west, with more development now occurring back near Boonah.  We stopped just south of Ipswich, and the sky looked to be very dramatic!  Everything was convecting, including one very large RFB which collected with the other storms to produce what became the very devastating thunderstorm that went through Brisbane.

We drove back into Ipswich and had to decide, NE or NW…well, we didn’t really want to get caught up in what was a developing supercell with 150-170km/h winds in Brisbane, so we went NW to sit on the outside of it.  Still, we had plenty of outflow with lots of roads covered with leaf debris and small branches.  We pushed northwards, running parallel to the main storm which was moving northwards incredibly quickly (ie 70-80km/h thanks to the outflow push!)  We finally got up towards Kilcoy but there was no way of getting east far enough to get in front of it.  So we decided to sit and wait, and watch it come across.  It was certainly still a green menacing site from our angle – when it moved over, we had strong winds of around 70km/h, torrential rain and some very small hail.