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
