Beaudesert-Amberley
Supercell
Another day and another big storm potential day for SE QLD! Shear was better to the south again, but I decided that I would hang back a little and not commit myself to NE NSW just in case something developed closer to home as they would both be fairly similar areas. The only thing I don’t like about doing this is sometimes if you don’t commit yourself to an area, you lose out on both areas (ie too late to move to either one, and as it was we could have been in better position for the Beaudesert storm had we left earlier! That’s the risk you take though, and I’ve been caught out several times waiting for too long rather than going in and choosing what’s readily available to me!) In the end I decided to head to the Gold Coast and wait there, as that would give me the option of heading down to NE NSW or chasing the border ranges of SE QLD. A cluster of storms developed south of Beaudesert but it wasn’t doing anything exciting (yet!!!) I met up with Jason again and we waited at his place for a bit, watching the updrafts bubbling up and down to the SW. They were gradually getting better so we decided to head towards Beaudesert as it looked to hit the Beaudesert-Canungra region.
Approaching Canungra, the storm was looking rather nice! But it was coming out of Canungra that it was truly looking like a beast with rock solid udprafts going straight up into a crisp, cumuli anvil and with inflow evident in the low-mid levels from the storm. Absolutely amazing – we were both having stormgasms at the structure – absolutely incredible and amongst the best I’ve seen!!!
We headed to Beaudesert where we experienced very large drops (the type that just about dent your car!) We shot north to the Christian lookout and watched the storm coming across which had some nice supercellular characteristics with inflow coming in from the N, and across the storm from the ENE.
Large drops and the advance of the rain curtain had us heading north again to Cedar Grove where we watched the storm again. We experienced some hail (1-2cm) ahead of the storm, falling from the anvil! It certainly hurt when it hit you – Jason didn’t get hit very much, but I guess since I’m larger and have a bigger surface area that I’m more likely to get hit by hailstones! :) The storm seemed to be heading due north, if anything NNW! Which was difficult as we’d have to go further N into Brisbane and head west to intercept it. There was also another storm, a right mover coming in from the Brisbane Valley and the two looked like they were going to collide near Amberley. The right mover also had some awesome updrafts and structure on it – today was very much a structure today!
Perhaps to do with the positioning of the dryline (as often drylines seemed to provide the opportunity for awesome structure, I guess the excess cloud evaporates leaving the main storm easy to see and view!) We shot west along the M4 and the M2 to head to Ipswich and view the storm. Here we finally witnessed rotation which confirmed my suspicions of this being a supercell, only it was beginning to weaken.
In the end as it was coming up to sunset, we decided to head just west of the storm and watch it from behind and hopefully get a nice sunset. The sunset wasn’t bad – the mammatus certainly was most impressive!
But a few other cells developed to our south from behind the dryline on the ranges. They gave some CGs which made for difficult photography due to the light around still after sunset, but I was able to manage to capture a couple!
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