The best storm of the day started early - but gave a punch!  109km/h winds recorded at Gatton and some pretty mean structure!

This storm season has been quite frustrating and the last few chase days were no exception.  Our final chance of decent daytime storms was ahead of a southerly change (which actually didn't eventuate until later!)  But of course, the storm season being the storm season it was, we had some cloud to contend with which wiped out the initial target area of the Northern Rivers.  So we thought we'd play the northern edge of the cloudband - which worked!  We headed out towards Laidley/Gatton as a starting point, storms began to develop on the Downs and eventually on the ranges.

One cell began to gain momentum near Gatton so we stopped just north of Laidley and watched it before eventually heading to Forest Hill and eventually north to Glenore Grove, which was just NE of Gatton.  It was here it looked most impressive with a big outflow push eventually making it look quite nasty and also brought a brown tinge to the sky thanks to all the dust!

In fact, a fair bit of dust began to get picked up (which gave us haunting memories of 2005 when we were near some one who was killed by flying debris from a destructive dust storm from a line of cells on the Downs).  We continued northeastwards but things got very cluttered very quickly and began to redevelop ahead of us.  It wasn't until we were near Caboolture (after driving through the Brisbane Valley) that we caught up with the next line of cells.  We had absolutely torrential rain wind wind gusts averaging 70-90km/h - large branches and bits of trees were being ripped off and visbility was nothing short of poor!  There were no shortage of flangs either (in fact, we witnessed a few close tree-hitting death flangs just prior in clear air!)  So it was certainly an exciting end to the chase - by the time we got to the Bruce Hwy, it looked like you had to be north of Gympie which was too far so we called it quits and headed home.