Severe
Supercell Chase - Funnel and Wall Cloud! A surface trough accompanied with an upper level trough was moving across the state during the week, it gave quite intense thunderstorms in SW QLD and NW NSW, so intense they lasted to the coast as they traveled over 1000km! With many Brisbanites being woken up to the sound of thunder from CC’s and CG’s during Thursday morning. Friday was shaping up to be a good day, and a good start to what was to be for me, four continuous and grueling days of chasing! In the morning, along the coast there was a lot of low Cu, it was quite widespread and quite cool, I decided to hear to just north of Warwick, this way I would have a quick route back down to the Border-Cunningham Ranges area, and also the Lockyer Valley. Allora seemed like a nice town to visit, and I spent a little time pottering around the town taking photographs as I waited for things to develop. I was noticing very strong CJ’s to the north near Toowoomba, and weaker CJ’s to the south to the east of Warwick. There was still a fair bit of low Cu inland, but nowhere as much as there was near the coast! The updrafts to the north, as impressive as they looked were not consistent, where as the weaker updrafts to the south were quite persistent. Liking consistency, I made my way down towards the Cunningham Hwy to find an advantage point to overlook onto the ranges to the east of Warwick. After some jockeying for position, and some dirt-road travelling, I found a great little lookout on the top of a hill to watch CJ’s develop into the first storms of the day!
Soon I was seeing nice slanted precipitation shafts and hearing my first few rumbles of thunder. I noticed that further east along the border ranges were also starting to fire with some very nice updrafts!
So I decided to head ENE towards Boonah and watch things develop there. There were some nice hail shafts forming now! And on the way, I observed a very nice twisting updraft to my north!!!
I was also noticing that the cells to the south now were intensifying quite rapidly. One gave a nice anvil and developing flank.
With the rapid development though, very soon the sky became quite cluttered, and I headed further north to get a better view of these cells towards Peaks Crossing. I jockeyed for position around there as I watched more cells develop, but nothing was gaining any significant structure as of yet! However, while driving towards the SE once again, I did notice a cell over the Cunningham Ranges drift over and keep its strength, and actually dropped what appeared to be a small funnel underneath the updraft region, ahead of the outflow though! It looks ‘rough,’ and initially I thought it to be in the “wrong” place, but going through the video footage it appears to be under the updraft region of the storm!
During this time, I also noticed nice development south of Boonah, in fact the Boonah development had finally become quite well organised, so I headed towards Boonah, and was greeted with a very welcome navy blue sky covering my south!
It was developing a weak shelf cloud as it progressed northwards. Chaser convergence with Jason and Ben at the Boonah lookout, and we headed northwards where some nice CG’s and lightning were observed! As well as an interesting area on the NW edge as it became more organised!
 This area soon became very impressive, as the guster smoothed out over the precipitation areas, and then curved back around on the NW edge to where a very interesting lowering existed! I thought this may have been a wall cloud, however there were trees in the way which stuffed up my view! Looking back at this storm and the position of the lowering, I am almost certain that this is a wall cloud.
I could see rapidly inflow on the NW edge though, as well as rapid outflow near the precipitation shaft. In fact, the outflow on the precipitation shaft was quite awesome! And some very fast moving and low scud formed an interesting lowerings from this as a strong rain foot went ahead!
I didn’t want to get too close, as there were some hailshafts in the storm, and I hadn’t quite yet built up enough confidence to be willing to get hailed on! But I wish I did get closer to have a look as the storm was still a good 5km away, and moving across me (i.e. not towards me). However, this cell gave winds that were strong enough to blow table and chairs set across the yard at my parents’ farm! And also some pea to 1cm size hail. On Saturday’s storm chase, I looked just south of the area near the farm and some of the roads were covered with leaves, and some trees down too! Presumably the leaves were from being stripped from hail.
I ended up getting lost in Ipswich, and the storm passed just to the west of there, but I intercepted it when it had weakened and got torrential rain on the Brisbane Valley Hwy, just 2-3km north of Blacksoil! But while being lost in Ipswich, I saw some absolutely phenomenal lightning bolts over to the west, including some great CC bolts underneath the base of the cell!!! Wow, what a great day this was! I thought this cell could have been a candidate for a supercell going by some of its structure, however if it was one, it was not one for very long (i.e., may have had one mesocyclonic updraft, with the others being non-mesocyclonic). Once again though, in hindsight this cell was almost certainly a supercell and a very nice one at that! A cell further west then this lasted for over eight hours and was most certainly a supercell, this had phenomenal updrafts on the back end!
However for me, it moved into unchasable territory as it entered the Brisbane Valley region and went further north through national park and forest and the back of the Great Dividing Range! This cell gave golf ball hail at Gatton (severe report courtesy of the Bureau of Meteorology). Thanks to James Chambers, Michael Bath and anyone else who I might have missed for radar updates! |
