Daylight Kyogle Lightning Show

January 19, 2003

With The next four days showed some interest – I had recently recovered from a back operation so was out of action for some time and badly wanted to do some more chasing.  The next four days had a trough hanging around the NE NSW and SE QLD area and I had those four days off work!

It was somewhat marginal today, DPs were in the low 20s but the PBL moisture was somewhat thin.  Not to mention the weak (err…non-existant?) shear!  5 knot N’ly @ 850, 5 knot SW’ly @ 700, 15 knot SW’ly @ 500 and 30 knot SW’ly @ 300.  Not really the ideal shear profile!  And with a shallow moist layer…I was a bit nervous about heading out – but I still thought there’d be something (more so in NE NSW) and so headed out.

I was meeting up with MB and Dave at MB’s house.  It took a little while to get down there – it was Sunday and a hot, humid summer’s day.  So every man and their dog was on the M1 heading to the coast for the day.  (Main problem was the M10 was backed up and that was affecting M1 traffic).  Once I got past the M10 interchange it was fairly smooth sailing into NSW.  While driving through Bangalow I could begin to see some development to the SW – some nice CJs were going up and that got me excited! 

It was a quick greeting at MB’s as we headed off into Lismore and picked up Rodney.  MB went with Rodney and Dave hopped into my car (we used the CB’s to talk to each other).  We headed to a lookout west of Casino and drove up to the top of the hill near the radio towers.  There was a line of weak showers to our west, but things were struggling somewhat!

For a while we watched (and I began to wish I bought some food with me, I only had drinks and didn’t have lunch yet).  A nice storm was heading off towards the north into SE QLD (which was frustrating for me!)  But I decided to stay in NE NSW because I was thinking some other stuff might develop.  There was some attempted storms to the S and SW, they were slowly moving towards the NE.  There was a bit of static on the Geiger counter, but we couldn’t see any lightning yet!  It was very hazy though, and we were getting radio updates from some one nearby that there was a relatively nice cell to our SW.  We could see it…but in the murky haze it was really difficult to be able to discern anything.  An awesome updraft went up towards our NE and that got my attention for a bit, although it didn’t end up doing much for us!  However it was nothing short of spectacular and Dave very aptly commented that it was the type of updraft that was so solid you could climb it!  (Which made me think back to my childhood days when I used to always wonder what a cloud would ‘feel’ like, but then was so disappointed to later learn they were just water vapour!)

At last the first CG was sighted!  That was soon followed by many other CGs and that got us excited.  One was quite close (just in the valley), and a couple of seconds later gave a great cracckkkbooooommmm!!!  We hopped into the cars as we were pretty much the highest point for kilometres on end and didn’t really want to be a contact point. 

After watching for a bit we decided to head east back on the Bruxner for a few kilometres to get in front of the storm.  We ended up stopping about 10-15km further E and then having a look at the situation.  The original storm we were chasing had weakened, but another storm had developed just to the north and was moving towards the NE.  We made a dash for Casino and then headed north on the Kyogle road to find another advantage point.  We stopped there for a bit and watched and soon a report came over one of Rodney’s radios that severe winds had hit the area we were just in!  A gust of 91km/h was recorded on an anneomter before the tower it was on collapsed!  We think the gust must have been much higher than that, just that it didn’t get recorded.

After some discussion we decided to keep heading north as it appeared that the storm was going to hit or go very close to Kyogle. 

While heading north it was looking very ominous just to our west with the storm taking on a rather nasty appearance! 

We stopped in Kyogle to witness some spectacular CGs – some were very close! 

Another storm developed right over us and gave some flangs – we made refuge for the car (well, MB and Dave did), and Rodney and I soon followed.  We raced out of town once again and sat just north – although for some reason the lightning decreased in frequency quite rapidly! 

Not to worry – some more storms developed to our WSW and we watched them produce some nice CGs. 

We witnessed some heavy rainshafts and tried to get underneath them (for a bit of fun), but that was a no go unfortunately.  We then watched some more very spectacular bolts of lightning to our north from the storm before eventually heading back towards Casino. 

There was some weak stuff down around Grafton but unfortunately it couldn’t give us the lightning show that we wanted.  We ate some McDonalds and KFC (over  a very comical dinner!) before I began to head off towards Brisbane.  Was quite an exciting chase after such a long time in ‘storm limbo!”