Grandchester Tornado

November 7, 2001

Storms seem to have a habit of occurring whenever you are at your busiest!  And for a uni student, perhaps the busiest time of year is exam block.  It was a slow start to the season – a few unseasonable nice storms in late August and early September…before dying into nearly nothing!  Meanwhile storms were going nicely down in Victoria and South Australia.  But the storms new exam block was coming, and waited intently to peak before exams!  Perhaps I was lucky, November 7 was the day after one of my exams, and it was going to be a designated partial rest day given my next exam was going to be a few days later.  I didn’t want to chase though – well, I did – but I wanted to relax (storm chasing is extremely exciting, but rarely relaxing!)  But the temptation was too much, and my study books and I made our way down to my normal lookout at Warrill View. 

I sat down with my study books sprawled all over the picnic table under one of the shelters and starting doing some Calculus.  I was quite proud of myself – but a large area of persistent convection to my west made it very difficult to concentrate!  So difficult that my study took a back seat – a quick call to Dr Pearce had me on my way towards the Rosewood and Gatton area.  A nice area of cells had developed and were going to move into that area.

They were moving relatively quickly – so I had to hurry.  I took advantage of the open speed limits and got to Grandchester with some time to spare.  I contemplating heading further west but decided against it.  There was a weak developing gustfront forming, and lots of good ‘greenage.’  Also were some nice lowerings underneath and behind the base.  One took my attention – it looked exactly like a tornado!  But I am fairly confident it wasn’t. 

Unfortunately, contrast was poor today – and I saw another interesting lowering about a kilometer south of the first.  There appeared to be some scud…or dust underneath it!  But I couldn’t tell, at first I thought it was scud – but it looked an awful like dust!  I kept videoing (although not as closely as I should have) and then reviewed the video footage.  It was so much clearer on TV – 100% tornado!!!  Nice tornado too, multivortex with a main funnel, with smaller areas of scud/funnels rotating around the main one – picking up two large areas of dust on the ground just a few kilometers away to my SW!

I got some strong winds from Grandchester to Rosewood – in Rosewood, nearly every wheelie bin was knocked over!  I was desperately trying to get in front of the gust front, it would have looked fantastic from the other side!  It had rapidly developed over the last 20 minutes, but that was to no avail. 

Thanks to the “storm traffic” in Ipswich (ie, parents  picking their kids up from school), I got caught in traffic jam after traffic jam – and then at the end of it all, I got caught in very heavy rain!  There were a couple of small trees down though on the edge of town at Ipswich though!  The M2 was a shocker – the entire right lane at times was underwater!  And the M2/M4 merge was also partially underwater (more so from the M2 going onto the M2).  I drove home continually with torrential rain, and then enjoyed the rest of the storms from home!  A great little chase though, it didn’t take up too much time – and I saw my first tornado for the season!!!