A Familiar Sky

Wednesday January 27 2010

Driving into Casino today as a severe storm was rolling into town was eerily familiar – the sky was initially quite reminiscent of driving into the violent supercell which trashed the city in January 2001. While today’s storm wasn’t anywhere near as severe, a large, boiling gustfront descended on the town in similarly spectacular fashion. It was actually such a rush to get to town before the storm hit that I didn’t have time to find a real good vantage point. The local footy fields it was!

The sky looked phenomenally green as the shelf cloud moved overhead. Powerful CG lightning was punching ahead of the storm and pulsating, letting off tremendous cracks of thunder, and it felt like all hell was about to break loose.

As the storm hit it was initially mostly very heavy rain and some gusts of wind. But this soon cranked up a notch – with winds gusting up towards the 100km/hr mark (the local weather station recorded at 91km/hr gust) and heaps of hail, getting up to an estimated 3-4cm in diameter, smacking into my car. With the very, very intense rain, my car was parked on the side of the road and I still couldn’t see in front of me at times! It’s always hard to explain the power of a storm in words, but hopefully the video below captures the ferocity of the storm (apologies for the camera shake - I had IS turned off at the start)! What an awesome storm chase!

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January finally delivers!

Sunday January 17 2010

After almost 12 months since a good storm chase, January 17 finally delivered! I set out when storms initiated south of Grafton and met up with a friend, Kate, who was joining me for her first storm chase. Things looked grim for probably the first 2 hours we were out there – stuck in the hot sun! We decided to head from Woodburn down to Maclean to at least try and intercept some ok looking storms passing through that area. As we arrived, it became clear new storms were rapidly developing on the outflow from the first round of storms. We raced north (at one point passing through an intense microburst that brought down gum trees right in front of us) to be greeted by a wild looking southern sky near Woodburn.

It was awesome seeing such a massive, ominous shelf cloud move in overhead! We headed towards Coraki, eventually being overtaken by the core. I saw out the corner of my eye a whole dog kennel that had been picked up by the winds and was thrown towards the car - disintegrating and crashing into a fence before crossing into our path. We eventually pulled over as we were buffeted by strong winds and eventually hail! It was mostly 1-2cm in size, but there looked to be a few 3cm stones in the mix. This line rapidly collapsed, so we decided to call it a day and I dropped Kate back to her car. However the crew from Brisbane (Anthony, Dave, Bryan, Andy and Mark) were in Lismore so I headed into town to catch up with them. As I went to meet them, another cell with nice base features had developed near Casino. We moved to watch this just south of Lismore as the daylight faded, and eventually the storm did too. Yet another cell developed and was giving off occasional lightning, so we setup our gear on the Lismore-Kyogle road as the lightning continued.

Not long after we got there it started to rain, but this soon cleared and allowed us all to get the cameras out again. It was an enjoyable time. Of course half the entertainment when photographing lightning with Dave Sercombe around is his running commentary - gold! :)