Pottsville HPS-Squall Line

January 25, 2004
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Sunday was a difficult choice, shear was better to the south but instability was probably better to the north due to the higher temperatures (despite what the models were saying in terms of instability and the upper trough).  It was also tempting to stay in the local area.  Certainly the sky was suggesting there'd definately be storms in SE QLD!

A cluster of storms had developed to the S but weren’t really doing very much, I was hoping they might hit the seabreeze front but I decided to head towards the coast to get into position for something further south.  I picked up Jason and we headed to a lookout, the storm to the west still wasn’t looking much chop so we headed south towards some stronger storms to the south.  Soon after though, the storm near Ipswich took off and produced a tornado to the NE of my house – quite frustrating!!! 

On the road south towards Ballina there were masses of updrafts developing still, but we couldn’t see many of the features because of the sun. 

Then the sun went behind the anvil and we got a brilliant view of the storm on top of a hill 29km N of Ballina on the highway – you could make out the meso region in the center, and the outflow pushing ahead and wrapping around while low level cu was flowing into the storm! 

Unfortunately the storm was slowly weakening (possibly crossing the seabreeze boundary), so it became quite HP-ish and outflow dominated, but due to the high moisture it still gave spectacular features!

We headed north again along the NR Fwy, looking behind at what we thought was a nice guster, but then I looked over my shoulder to the SE and quickly stopped the car to take photos – an awesome multi-layered guster was about to cross the coast! 

We grabbed some quick snaps in the emergency stormchasing lane and headed north to find an exit to take us to the coast, we found the Pottsville exit so headed to Pottsville.  Failing views around Pottsville lead us to the beach, a quick trudge through some trees lead us to a deserted beach to enjoy the arrival of the gustfront!  We were quite fortunate it was low tide as we were able to go right up to the water’s edge to take a series of photos coming across.

We ended up waiting until the gustfront was nearly upon us before racing back to the car and back up towards the freeway. 

The storm moved across us giving an awesome arrival flang in the field next to us and then some strong, gusty winds (70km/h) and some small hail between 1-2cm.  Initially there wasn’t much and we were able to count the individual stones, but it gradually increased and made it quite a fun experience with the driving wind and rain also!  We headed north again after, but the guster had weakened.  We wanted to get some lightning photos from Coolangatta afterwards, but once again that was a no go with most of the lightning being chippy (CC) lightning as opposed to CGs.  But that did’t matter, it was still a spectacular storm to witness coming across!!!