Spectacular
SE QLD Lightning Show!
November 13 turned out to be quite a surprise! While the storms themselves were not unexpected – a weak trough to the west, a southerly change moving up the coast an a weak shortwave at 500 meant that there would be some instability with the NE’lies over the coast. However the moisture depth was quite shallow, and the low to mid levels quite dry. Shear was also very weak – this created a spectacular lightning show, with little precipitation in the storms initially with slow movement giving great video and photographic opportunities! The storms eventually went into thundery rain, but even then continued to produce some great lightning. I was working in the afternoon, so I had hoped that stuff would develop quite late in the afternoon and evening to enable a good chasing opportunity. Some showers began to develop on the ranges during the afternoon, as well as in the Downs. I had talked to James Chambers (friend of mine) and we’d agreed to head out chasing after I finished work. I finished soon after 4pm, so headed south to pick up James (it was generally on the way to head west). We shot onto the M6, got onto the M4 and road out on the M2 which while was heavy, was still moving thankfully! After getting onto the Cunningham we noticed that static had increased noticeably with plenty of close static, this got us excited!
The storms that developed on the ranges seemed to be a little stronger than they did before. We went to the Cunningham Lookout and Warrill View and sat there. Here we watched a copious number of CGs from the outskirts of the developing line of storms.
The northern edge looked stronger than the rest with better structure. After watching CGs (and a developing guster to the south that eventually gusted out) we decided to head west a little in case we had to go further north to get into position for the larger cell.
I knew a few lookouts on the way, we stopped on a back road to Mt Mort and setup for video and photos as evening was going to be soon. CGs were quite spectacular on the edges of the rain curtains! Only we were relatively closish, so only a handful were on video (given there was over 200 degrees of storms/CGs for the viewing!)
The storms moved extremely slowly, they produced several gustfronts before they gusted out and another developed. The storms were moving so slowly you could have setup a BBQ and eaten while you waited! We even saw some rotation just above us – but this was more so a little rotaty bit then anything else.
An updraft base developed virtually right above us though, and began to become lightning active! However its first sign that it was lightning active came from an absolutely blinding CG hitting a small rise in the hill beside us just a couple of hundred of metres away! We both saw the CG and exclaimed – temporarily blinding us and then followed by a deafening crack of thunder!!! Soon after this I decided to pack up some of my stuff and get in the car. But soon we both had to, as the rain finally came across. We stayed in the car for a bit and videoed before heading northeast to try and get out of the rain. This was when it was beginning to spread out into a little more rain, and unfortunately we never really got out of the rain so we had to take video only. But we were treated to some absolutely awesome CGs hitting just to our west and southwest and were generally only a few kilometres away so they were great to watch!
Afterwards, we ended up heading eastwards back to Brisbane, then south down the coast where a few more active cells were (as the stuff around us had begun to weaken after several hours of awesome lightning!) We met up with Jason Rainforest at his lookout at Gaven and watched some fairly spectacular crawlers before calling it a night! What an awesome night though, the CGs were just fantastic!!! |
