Australian Severe Weather Forum

Thanks for posting those beautiful storm photos David. It is rather frustrating not being able to chase the region!!

James Harris emailed me the following photo taken 3km north of Quambone (50ks west of Coonamble) on Tues 27th at 6.07pm.   Again, the storms just take on a magic appearance on the plains when conditions are right.

Thanks Michael for posting that photo up. SSC should be up and running in the next few weeks. Dann has been busy designing a new website which will be a big upgrade over our last one. It's just taken a little longer than we first anticipated! It should be worth the wait though. It's amazing how much time our passion for storms can take up.

That storm in the photo above had been going since around 2pm. As I mentioned in my previous post, we kept on seeing glimpses of it to our west through another storm in front. If there was a better road option out there and we were a little closer to home, I would have core punched the first cell to watch it. Never the less we finally got to it at 6pm as it approached Quambone and it sure still looked nice. Some amazing interaction between the inflow and outflow at times. The wall cloud went through stages of being well defined as the 15-20 knot North-easterly fed in, until outflow from the RFD behind the wall cloud would push it out, giving it a guster appearance. Sure enough the inflow would then push back in and the wall cloud became solid again. If only we had a low level jet!

I love chasing out here, the land and scenery just gives you that big storm feeling. Bring on the Tamworth Radar please.

David , great photos of such a great looking storm. It's great having a chaser out your way to capture some of the best storms NSW can offer.

Hi James, yeah we saw some similar antics on our cell as well. Some of the photos I posted are just as the outflow was picking up, and on the full AVI I put together (but haven't posted anywhere yet) you can see the outflow blow right through the inflow region starting from the back. Although that was probably the last hit for this cell as, looking at the radar, it seemed to change character after that and turned into more widespread rain.

Very nice photo or your cell as well. You can really see that greenness in the clouds that we could see with our eyes but our cameras didn't seem to capture well.

Best wishes,
  Dave

Thanks very much for posting the fantastic pics guys. The microburst from the Walgett Supercell looks huge!

David that is a really beautifull supercell (06840.jpg). It reminds me a lot of a supercell I chased out that was in 2004. Check it out Here

That's a great place to chase the best storms in this country.

Jeff.

That is an gobsmacking storm Jeff. Where abouts was it? Is that the Warrumbungles in the background?
Regards,
  Dave

James,

Very nice contrast and outflow structure in that storm. The meso was elevated - not unusual for a majority of our storms. Despite this, I am sure the storms were pretty long lived. And I agree, what a different it makes if we had that inflow!

Great storms all around!

Regards,

Jimmy Deguara

Hi guys,
I thought I'd show you two rather large storms from the 27.2.07 that converged right over us here at Lightning Ridge, North-Western NSW. Both of these storms were anviled nicely, extremely cg active, small hail and a bucket load of rain!


The wind gusts from this "monster plow" of a shelf cloud must have been between 150-200k's, maybe even more from the damage I saw! We had a pretty hard time trying to catch the alluvial daylight cg's as they were everywhere and as you all know you can only point the camera in one direction at one time lol?


This photo, taken on the Castlereagh highway, 15k's northwest of the Ridge is the "converging" storm approaching from the north and would meet up with the storm in the picture above that was approaching from the west, resulting in a spectacular weather experience!


Moments before the onslaught hits town! Russ and I were quite amazed at what we were seeing here as we have never seen a shelf cloud stretch from cloud to ground like this one (is there a cg category for shelf clouds? Maybe there should be lol?). This is the only lightning (if you can call it that) I managed from this position even though cg's were hammering down all around us at this stage. I have some partial video of this massive shelf cloud in action.


This is the shelf cloud racing across town at great speed. I did manage to catch a small well hidden cg here and shortly after it rained heavily to say the least, we pretty well swam back to the car as the streets were rivers with class one rapids lol!


This is the resulting damage (I took these the next day) to our little caravan at an opal field 40k's north of the Ridge called Jag Hill, where I work. It was thrown 15mtrs or so and is pretty well buggered now! There was a 12tonne blower ripped from a working mine shaft and thrown across the claim while it was still connected to a hydraulic digging machine underground! The18foot caravan on the claim next to ours was pushed so hard that the tires were buried a foot or so into the dirt and dragged sideways two feet even though it was already against some trees!


This is looking west from our claim up towards the top of Jag Hill and shows a small part of the devastation done by the shelf cloud. On the top of the Jag Hill ridge there were 15inch diameter trees snapped off like matchsticks and strewn about. I could have imagined it was a total "white-out"! The damage was very widespread out here and there is another field 7k's across a dry lake from Jag Hill that also got smashed by the furious winds.

Definately the storm of the season! (for us anyway)
Kindest regards,
Shauno.


MB Edit - moved to the NW NSW thread for this date
 

Thanks for that great report of events Shaun!

Check out the Moree Sounding. It shows deep moisture and high DPs right to the surface - conditions that will lead to ground scraping shelf cloud structures.

regards, Michael

Thank you kindly for moving the report to the correct thread Michael!

It was definately a storm chasers dream out our way on the 27th. There were quite a few massive cells around the surrounding area that may have attracted chasers from miles around

Cheers,
Shauno.

The calls you have pictured look quite impressive - obviously outflow dominant but that is quite normal for this country. The damage looks quite extensive. The colours combined with the lightning would have made impressive video.

Regards,

Jimmy Deguara