Just a week after the first chase of the season came the first supercell of the season!  Nicely contrasted and well striated, it packed a good punch in Kilcoy!

 Today was the first of three big days across southeast Queensland.  Well, today wasn't really big when compared to the following two days!  But nonetheless, it offered some impressive supercell structure (that just in the scheme of the following days, didn't seem so great!)

Dave and I headed out during the afternoon, our aim was to head west of the Warrego and see what happens.  Unfortunately, the Ipswich Mwy (bless its dear little heart) was gridlocked again (and so early in the afternoon!)  After a few quick moves, we diverted onto the M5 and came up from the back way into southern Ipswich.  It was frustrating because radar was showing rapid development of storms just near Esk!  Still, they were slow moving so we felt we might be in with a shot.

From the Warrego, we shot northwards towards Esk.  Soon enough we came up behind the storm and punched through it (the main part of the storm had moved just to the east of Esk, but another was developing to the west).  There was flash flooding in Esk, but we continued northwards to get a better view of the westward storm which seemed to take shape.

It had a few goes of getting organised, each time having an impressive RFB and some interesting curvature into the base.  The storm kept going NE, and the only road option we had was to go north, and then east towards Kilcoy (which is where the storm was heading to).  Here is when it began to get really interesting!  From just outside Kilcoy the structure was looking VERY meaty. 

So we stopped (a nice farmer let us use his field), and took some timelapse.  The timelapse is actually pretty impressive and I was very happy with it (given we had about a 30min, nicely contrasted evolution of a supercell approaching us!) 

Eventually the storm was very close and we took shelter near a service station.  However the hail was only small (no more than 1-2cm), although we had some very strong gusts of about 90-100km/h with torrential rain.