South Brisbane Monster Supercell

December 30, 2001

Sunday was shaping up to be the best day of the lot with not too much upper level moisture and a fair bit of instability and shear.  I had a friend of mine up from Victoria who had come up to enjoy the lovely warm, humid and stormy Queensland weather!  I was hoping that today would be good, especially after he had travelled over 2000km so it would have been nice to have something good!  Sure enough - QLD performed nicely!!!  For part of the time anyway.

Tony and his friend stayed at Warwick the previous night - I told them to stay there for a while and see what happens, meanwhile I'd head towards Warrill View.  From Warrill View I could see some nice convection to the south and along the Cunningham Ranges - Tony and I discussed it and I suggested to him that it might be a border ranges day given the position and look of the convection around the place. 

So Tony was going to head towards my way and see what happened.  Before he got to Warrill View though, I told him that I would meet him at Aratula - some weak storms were anvilling out to the south of Aratula, so I thought it might be an idea to head towards Boonah eventually - as the steering flow would send storms somewhat easterly. 

We met up at Aratula - under a few nice rumbles of thunder from the storm just to our south.  We then headed up to Boonah to re-assess the situation, the storm appeared to be strengthening a little with a nice RFB and some rain feet. 

We were greeted at the Boonah lookout from a massive CG about 2km to our south, it looked fantastic as we were higher than where the CG hit and we could see exactly where it hit (just on the southern side of town), it gave a great bang where we were.  The storm was slowly moving eastwards, not very fast - but a call to Doc revealed that the storm had now gone into the red, although looked disorganised.  That's what the storm generally looked like from where we were, disorganised - but possibly severe (pulse).  We stayed at the lookout for a while - hoping to see a few more CGs, but that wasn't to be (well, temporarily anyway).  An interesting feature developed under the main base of the storm, it began to take on a circular appearance, but it was like a ring, with a hole in the middle of the ring - it took a while before we could visually make out rotation rather than assuming there was rotation because of what it looked like, but it was very unusual! 

The storm was slowly propagating to the north and moving towards us - the precipitation cascade was gradually coming closer - and so was a CG!  About 1km away, I was videoing at the time and only got part of the CG in the frame (while zoomed out!)

Just as we were leaving we had some gusty outflow hit us sending lots of old leaves debris over the road.  We headed north to the intersection of Ipswich-Boonah and Beaudesert-Boonah road so we had some options - we stopped and viewed the storm to the south.  The meso-like feature had been absorbed back into the storm and was fairly ill-defined.  But we sat there for a while as the storm was moving just south of us to the east, but with a tad of north in the movement. 

We had some very strong outflow winds come through, with the grass being flattened and lots of dust being kicked up ahead of the storm!  We had branches flying in front of us from 500m away!  We recorded a wind gust of 75km/h on Tony's anemometer, but at the height of it we didn't have the anemometer parallel with the wind direction, gusts were probably up to 80-85km/h - so much so Tony's shirt actually became unbuttoned!

We headed eastwards along Beaudesert-Boonah road - a few flangs and some brief bursts of heavy rain and strong winds were experienced along the road - we stopped at a vantage point near Beaudesert and watched for a while.  The storm was shrouded with a fair bit of anvil rain unfortunately, but it looked a little more interesting...almost as if it was looking to go more towards the north.  I discussed this with Tony and suggested we head north along the Mt Lindsay Hwy towards Brisbane.  The radar loop of this storm was particularly impressive - the storm effectively did a 90 degree left turn and went almost due north! 

Following the highway nicely northwards (about 5km to the west of the highway), I took some video footage as we headed north - occasionally ducking westwards for a quick look at the storm - unfortunately the views along the Mt Lindsay Hwy are pretty hopeless for a good 20km or so, so it made it difficult - but in one of the roads it looked like an absolute monster!!!  A massive guster/RFB feature - with constant rumbles of thunder, it was an eerie feeling. 

We headed north again and stopped at a fruit shop that had a clear view - it almost looked like there were two storms, but it was still the same storm - constant thunder continued with some very low scud lowerings around the periphery of the storm! 
 
 

It was absolute bliss sitting there and watching it - we also had chaser convergence with Ben Quinn!  He had also been following this storm from Boonah.  Some 1cm hail started falling ahead of the storm, so we decided to head north to try and stay ahead of it.  Unfortunately, some additional traffic and some traffic lights as we were coming into the far southern suburbs of Brisbane slowed us down!  Jonty Hall from the BoM rang to find out if I was out and about and if I could see anything, and as he rang hail of about 2-3cm started falling.  I had to hang up to try and find shelter, but that wasn't to be!  We pulled over on the side of the road and videoed the torrential rain and hail for a good 10-12 minutes.  A few isolated stones were larger than the others, but they were breaking on impact...it's difficult to make them out on the video, but they looked (from memory) to be approaching 4cm or so (near golfballs), golfball hail was reported from our location (Calamvale) very close - so it was probably about right! 

We headed north to try and see if we could find shelter again for the cars, but to no avail!  Meanwhile, we had winds in blinding rain/hail of 90-100km/h with absolute zero visibility! 

Some large branches came down over the road, and the power went out in the area we were in.  Every servo, tree and scrap of shelter was taken up as cars flocked to try and protect their cars! 

I called Jonty and reported what we had, he mentioned the storm was moving generally NE...I gave Tony a call (even though he was just behind me I couldn't jump out of the car in the rain and hail!) and decided we'd chance it to go back south through the storm to get out of it.  Fortunately the hail didn't get any bigger, and we eventually got out of the storm!  We headed for a servo (now vacant and without power) to discuss our options.  The storms to the SW were still in the red...but unfortunately they soon collapsed into a rain area - so we headed west to see what we could get.  A few weak cells developed, but most were to the north - the storms to the north looked nice!  We pottered around the Marburg area before eventually stopping for a sunset.  We headed back towards my place and Tony and Scott jumped in my car - we wanted to see some lightning, and we could see lightning to the north so we headed north!

The lightning was a flash every 1-2 seconds or so, not too bad!  We ended up at Noosa before we stopped, refueled (2mins before the servo closed, which was good considering the fuel gauge had dropped before "E!")  And then grabbed some pizza and ate pizza near the beach and watched lightning to the north - quite a nice evening to end things off!  Well, we thought it'd end it anyway.  We headed back to my place (just under 2hrs south),  we were all quite tired and had anticipated to go to bed when we got back to my place in Brisbane.  We arrived back just before 1am.  Tony and I loaded up radar - to our surprise some more showers and storms had developed in the southern Downs!  Well, we had a dilemma, we were very tired - so we decided to wait a bit before doing anything.  Tony wanted to have a shower - I said that I'd head off to bed and for him to wake me if things looked much more interesting, if not I've set my alarm for 2am (45mins time), but I'd like a quick power-nap if we did anything.  Well, those were the intentions.  I had been lying down for ten minutes when Tony came in saying "Anthony, if you're asleep you had better wake up!"  I wasn't asleep, just resting there - I glanced at the radar a nice line of yellow/green/pink had developed.  My reply was "Hang on, I have to put on my shoes!"  Scott stayed - thinking Tony and I were crazy!  But we headed towards Boonah, updated by Simon Angell (the only person up!)   We witnessed some nice lightning, although not too many CGs unfortunately - but we did see a power transformer blow up near Boonah! 

We stopped about 5km north of Boonah and enjoyed the lightning, 1-2 flashes a second.  Although I fell asleep at around 3:45am for about 15mins or so before being woken up by Tony.  We sat a little longer and then headed back to my place, still seeing lightning to the south.  We got back home at 5:30am, storms were still going - but we enjoyed these from our house, I finally got to bed just after 6am - before waking up at 10am, all ready for another day of chasing!!!