Australian Severe Storms, Weather Events and Storm Chasing

[John Allen]

For those of you who watched the news, nice shots of what I  think was a Landspout type tornado near Geelong this afternoon. Ironically when coming home i saw this nice bit of convection and thought about going for a look, and then saw it was near geelong and decided against it due to not only traffic, but the need to do some of these damn assignments. Sure enough the weather just has to go rub my nose in it.

[Jeff Brislane]

Not a bad looking tornado from this picture. Defniately you'd have to be in the right place at the right time for an event on this scale.

 http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2007/05/14/3689_news.html

[Michael Bath]

Yes - quite a significant landspout !

Melbourne radar loop
Melbourne sounding 00z


Another newspaper article here:

http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2007/05/15/3700_news.html

In case those images disappear over time...


(copyright unknown)


(copyright Dave Evans)

[Jeff Brislane]

Check out the typos in this article by "The Age"

A SMALL tornado caused alarm in regional Victoria yesterday as it twisted across open plains near the You Yangs Regional Park.

The spectacular sighting, just 50 kilometres from Melbourne, was caught on camera by many nearby residents and passers-by, and the Bureau of Meteorology was bombarded with calls.

Jeb Byrne, 61, of Mount Mercer, was travelling between Little River and Anakie when he saw what he thought was a plane crashing to earth.

"When I initially saw it, I was so startled — it literally looked like it was an aircraft that had plummeted out of the cloud with a trail of black smoke behind it," said Mr Byrne, a former commercial pilot.

"It extended right up into the cloud … It was quite fantastic."

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Ward Rooney confirmed the tornado, also known as a willy-willy, was very weak — and probably would not register on the official Fujitsu tornado scale. There were no reports of injury or damage.

Mr Rooney said tornadoes, which are thought to be caused by the strong updrafts and downdrafts of air within severe thunderstorm clouds, were not unusual. What was unusual, he said, was for such an event to be caught on camera.

Experts believe there are one or two tornadoes in Victoria every year, but most go unnoticed.

I wonder if that's a mis-quote, mis-print or the actual words of the BoM forcaster!

[David Brodrick]

Thanks for posting all the good links everyone. It looks like there was no instability in that sounding and nothing impressive shear-wise, so any ideas why these formed? The Geelong Advertiser article says "created by a vacuum of opposing winds"??

This ABC article says there were two tornadoes in the area:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1922629.htm

Regards,
  Dave

[David C]

Thanks for posting all the good links everyone. It looks like there was no instability in that sounding and nothing impressive shear-wise, so any ideas why these formed? The Geelong Advertiser article says "created by a vacuum of opposing winds"??

This ABC article says there were two tornadoes in the area:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1922629.htm

Regards,
  Dave

Definitely a nice landspout tornado. You can see a developing updraft base, and obviously there was some convergence boundary near the surface (source of horizontal vorticity). I saw some video of it last night on the news and this showed dense precip off to the left and I could quite clearly see the gustfront pushing the tornado out at the surface.

Quote from BoM (see abc link above): Duty forecaster Jeff Feren says tornados in Victoria are nothing like those that cause a lot of destruction in the US.

Yeah, while damaging tornadoes are rare in that part of the world you think such events could still be used to plug public awareness that, albeit occasionally, very damaging tornadoes can and do occur in Victoria. (Of course this assumes that the reporter was effective in congealing the salient points into a story, and given their use of 'tornados' it's perhaps not wise to assume too much :) ).

[Mike]

Yes interesting quotes there!  Was the reporter paraphrasing what the actual BoM staff member said?  It's documented that landspouts can be just as damaging as an EF0-EF2 tornado that's for sure. Looks are deceiving!  Impressive shots though.

As an aside... I read with interest in the report on the Greensburg event that there was reference to 'calves being flung into the air' - certainly the farmers in that Vic area might have been thinking the same thing considering how 'rare' these things are in that part of the woods in Vic.

SA, Vic and Central NSW expecting storms either today (15th) or Wednesday 16th - happy chasing everyone!

Mike