Nindigully Supercell!

November 8, 2005

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It had been a very frustrating system to forecast.  Areas of potential chase regions swapping and changing all the time…sometimes the models had good shear, then bad shear, then ok shear, then excellent shear then non-existent shear and then it’d swap where the trough would lie, where the instability would be and so forth!!!

Bryan and I headed out on Monday to see if we could get the chance of anything – as it did look that the following day would be reasonable somewhere in central Queensland so we thought we may as well head out a day earlier and see if we could get anything decent.  A line developed early west of St George and Mungindi – we were originally making a line for St George, but checking the radar at Moonie suggested that the line would be well and truly through St George by the time we got there, so we decided to head south to Goondiwindi and then head west from there as that gave us more chasing options.  In the end, the line collapsed rapidly and fell into a rain and CG area due to the weaker shear, but later that night in Goondiwindi we had a nice storm come through which was fun!

The next morning commenced cloudy but the satpic was showing everything clearing towards the coast.  Soon enough, we were under beaming sunny skies with strong heating and a rather stiff northerly (much stronger than forecast).  After much waiting we decided to head west to Boomi with the vis satpic showing the trough/dryline much further west than forecast.  At Boomi, we could see some cells developing to the west – a check of radar confirmed some nice activity, so we headed west to Mungindi.  Here is where it began to get interesting with a persistent and very nice cell developing to our northwest which consistently looked interesting.  It appeared to be moving NE, while the other cells were moving E/SE which was also interesting to see.

We shot northwards, but the cell appeared to weaken for a short period of time, the southern side gusted out and it produced a little shelf and roll cloud, but were encouraged by what appeared to be stronger updrafts on the cells northern side redeveloping.  

We headed north towards Thallon and up to the next highway junction…but on the way there were some brilliant hail shafts we wanted to take some photos of.  We quickly stopped – but then Bryan pointed out the swirling clouds overhead!  I looked up and noticed the entire RFB above us was rotating with speed!!!  

We had to go north by about 10-15km before we could head east on the next highway – and of course, the highway was just horribly treed!!!  Just hopeless, we were desperately looking for a clearing in the trees with a lovely developing wall cloud and constant CGs coming down near the wallcloud region!

Finally a small village provided the tree clearing that we needed…the we were able to witness up close and personal, the evolving nature of a lovely wallcloud with a beautiful saucer-shaped meso on top of it as the entire system rotated!  The photos make the storm look a lot further away as one of them is a 5 image vertical pan stitched together, the wall cloud was within 1-2km of us at the closest point, of which we had 2cm hail falling at the time.  

Byran was videoing on his digi-cam and got this awesome CG too!!!

We had to unfortunately head eastwards (punching through the rain/light hail core), and eventually give the storm a miss because there were no more roads to keep going north which was very frustrating!!!  However as a consolation prize, we did have a lovely rainbow and beautiful sunset to witness on the way back to Goondiwindi before heading on the 3.5hr treck back home!!