A cricketball hail supercell developed right near us bringing some incredible photos and then a great lightning show later that evening!

Thursdays have to be my worst days for chasing...but somehow I managed to shuffle everything around to get out of Brisbane just after lunchtime...Dave, Jake and I headed down towards Boonah and then eventually towards Warwick (with some nice northward moving cells developing east of Warwick, and the sky looking a little flat around the Southeast Plains a bit).  We stopped just northeast of Freestone and decided to watch a developing cell.  The updrafts were incredible!!  Rocketing straight up and soaring overhead - along with some solid easterly inflow (you can see the large Aussie flag well outstretched!), it was certainly looking quite promising.

Soon enough a small wall cloud developed and that was enough for us to want to get closer - we stopped just north of Freestone and could see some great hail curtains (which was soon supported by a couple of frantic calls from Macca, one reporting 4-5cm hail, and the other a 7cm hail report with at least one broken window!)

The storm was rapidly becoming outflow dominant - but it still looked nonetheless impressive with the RFB/guster/wall cloud combo (eventually evolving to more of a guster) still looking nice.  However with outflow soon pushing well ahead of the storm, our attention was soon drawn to a large RFB to the northwest.

We were trying to decide if we should head NE with the current cell across the ranges, or push N/NW in the hope that the RFB would develop - eventually it was decided we had to go with the RFB, it was looking better and better by the second!  As we were driving through Allora (which was soon smashed by golfball to tennis ball sized hail and severe winds 10-15mins later) the RFB was just INCREDIBLE!  One of the largest (possibly the largest!) I'd ever seen.  We raced northwards and then decided to head northeast a little on the Gatton road (to give us options to cut back in front of the storm if it went NW, or if it went up through the Lockyer Valley, we could go NE).  The scene was looking pretty awesome...we had a lost of smoke haze so had to allow the storm to get quite close - but the greeness was just incredible!

Soon we had to make a decision - that was to continue to head north a bit - so we raced west then north along the New England Hwy.  It seemed we weren't the only ones worried about hail, with the average speed on the highway seeming to be well above the speed limit by all the cars racing away from the storm!  With good reason too, it was looking pretty epic (end of the world type stuff) behind us.  Even though structually it was messy - it had 'nasty' written all over it!

Another cell was coming in from the NW, and eventually the two cells collided - we were left in limbo as to what would happen - but the overall movement looked to be more easterly.  So in Toowoomba we headed eastwards towards Rosewood where it was now getting dark and we were then treated to a great lightning show!  The CGs were incredible frequent, every 3 seconds at times...in one of the shots below there's 8 CGs in an exposure that was 29 seconds long!  (Check the EXIF data if you don't believe me!)  So it was certainly very active.

We took shelter at the Rosewood train station and enjoyed some close CGs (one took the power out briefly), and some very heavy rain.  We eventually headed east with the storm (in torrential rain and strong winds at times) before finally coming home.  We did witness one thing at home though - a CG took the power out of our street as it hit a powerpole/light pole with a nice explosion of sparks!