Gatton Supercell

October 13, 2005

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I was struggling to finish work when I wanted to…but I was able to head out just after 5pm to a nice cell that was approaching Gatton on radar!  Getting up close to it though was even more impressive, with obvious supercell structure!  But I can certainly say I don’t think I’ve cursed so much before as I have when I discovered that my video camera battery was flat and in my rush I didn’t take the spare one!!!

At Gatton, I stopped and took some photos of the storm…it was rather low contrast, but it was still something.  There was a close CG…so I decided to get in the car (few hundred metres away), but I was glad that I did!  I had about 5-6 CGs in the next couple of minutes strike within about 30-50m of the car!!  It was incredible, I was literally curled up into a ball in the car virtually terrified the car would get struck…when there was a quiet patch I ended up flying northwards to get out of the CG region…but still had many more CGs within a few hundred metres while driving.  When I got a safer distance away I tried for some photos…it was still light so I couldn’t have the shutter open for very long…but did get one shot thankfully!

Soon after the storm began to gust out…but it had a lovely green tinge and looked very nasty.  I took long exposure as it was getting darker now and it illuminated the guster and green very well!  I headed northeastwards, hoping to stay in front and get some evening lightning shots…but of course, it all died just after sunset with virtually no lightning at all!  It’s always incredibly frustrating when you have such a lightning active storm suddenly do nothing once you can really get some photos from it but oh well!