Northern Rivers Spectacular Electrical Storm

January 8, 2003

With moist NE’lies feeding down into a trough running down the northern NSW coast and dry westerlies behind it, I was pondering about lighting potential.  LIs were forecast mostly around -1, but they were pushing -2 to -3 offshore.  After creating some LI forecasts of my own and carefully watching moisture along the coast, I decided that the “real” LI values were closer to around -4 and that the NE NSW coastal regions should hopefully fire later that day.  I ended up leaving my place at around 1:45pm.  However I ran into a hiccup just before I reached the border – my boss phoned me at 2:30pm needing me to work urgently!  I had to race back up to Brisbane and do a couple of hours work (it was hard to do with overshooting tops to my south), in the end a nice LP storm developed near Casino with some hail.  I was disappointed that I missed it, but I finished work just after 5pm and then decided that there would still be the potential for nice lightning later that night and headed south on the M1.  I picked up a friend of mine (Jason) on the way, with his work just off the highway.  We went back to his place quickly, and took some nice sunset photos from a nearby lookout before shooting southwards. 

The storms to the south looked interesting, there was good development on the western edges which suggested backbuilding.  Soon after we hit the NR Fwy we could see lightning (frequent at times too!)  We ended up stopping on Old Byron Bay Rd, about 18km north of Ballina and we were watching CGs to our S.  It was quite impressive, there were some nice CGs!  And eventually a fairly nice gustfront developed too as the storm went offshore over Ballina.  We got some brief, gusty southerly outflow and decided to head north and stay ahead of the storm.  But the storm collapsed soon after, however there was heaps of static on the radio and on our views back to the south we could see some frequent lightning again!  So we headed south back to Old Byron Bay Rd – oh my God what a display!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

This season has been spectacular for lightning, but this absolutely took the cake!!!  So many CGs and many of them were beautifully forked!  We had a great view as storm after storm moved just to our south, there were some beautifully deep rumbles of thunder from it!  One storm in particular was insane, it was constantly flashing away with heaps of CGs!!!  It was the best of the lot, and eventually produced a beautiful inflow band over Ballina (which looked quite spectacular as it was lit up by lightning!)  Even as it moved out to sea it produced some beautiful CGs, with lovely reflections on the water!

A closer storm developed just to our west and gave some closer CGs – they were perhaps the most spectacular of the lot!!!  At one stage, I was standing beside my tripod and my hair suddenly stood up on end, to which a CG then struck behind us about 1.5km away and my hair immediately fell back down again!  It was quite an experience.  We ended up leaving at around 11:20pm as the cell to our W began to move over and produce some rain.  We got some moderate to heavy rain on the highway, before clearing with sporadic nice CGs off to the east on the NR Fwy!  Even on the M1 you could still see lightning, but it had weakened dramatically.

We got back to Jason’s at around 12:45am, my back was a bit sore (and given I have had back surgery recently, and was not supposed to be driving for another week still and had just done 600km that day…) and being quite tired I crashed the night there before heading back home in the morning.

What a benchmark!!!  I’d never really given lightning photography a go before, but it was worth it and I learnt a lot from it!  Can’t wait to take more now!!!

My partner Jason Rainforest got some absolutely PHENOMENAL photos from the closer storm that moved over us, and one magnificent shot over the water, they are below: