Hi all, I have finally had a moment to sit down and post some comments about this day. 7th Feb was a group chase With Dave-wx, Flip, Shane, lil Ben and Ben from South Australia who specially drove over to chase for a few days with us. Thankyou to Michael Bath who has hosted all of my pictures from this day.
The day for me started off from Bathurst with the sky pumped full of accas everywhere at 9am or so after I woke from a late night out chasing south of there. We fired up my one week old laptop and began with a sat picture which certainly showed the Victorian cloud mass from the previous day encroaching on the Goulburn area, which was almost visible to our far SW in amongst left over previous nights storm activity. It was decided we should get going and move north to Mudgee and get another look at the sat picture there. While having lunch in Mudgee congestus was really building up with lots of other unstable clouds to our east. We decided to make haste to Cassilis as road options east west and north were good and gave a reasonable chance to stay with the storm. The trough line was NNW SSE oriented so small cumulus fields were visible just to the west of our target area on the lunchtime sat picture.
After arriving at the Golden Highway intersection with the Mudgee road we proceeded west for about 6kms and found a nice spot to get off the road safely for three cars. Small congestus towers were now clearly visible to our west. These first storms appeared high based but not short on moisture - nice thick anvils persisted all the time. After a while it became apparent that the northern most cell was getting a huge RFB and began to dominate and move forward feeding on the reasonable sfc inflow of about 10knts.
This storm proceeded eastwards and encountered a small range west of Merriwa which IMO could have helped this storm with some orographic assistance. Intensifying rapidly, numerous CGs were now powering and suddenly outflow was visible by a dust plume along the ground in front of the storm. A guster was rapidly forming. One of the cars behind us then yelled in the radio Gustnado! and we all were really excited at seeing one so close!
This storm now began its RFB lowering development near or just east of Merriwa. Lots of turbulent looking areas and heaps of greenage (Vault region). Still once again powerful CGs visible but couldn't linger as we didn't want to get swallowed up by a duster guster
.
Now we proceeded non stop to Scone and at times blasted by severe outflow winds from the storm's NE flank. I started using my A530 out the window in vain attempts to capture a rather well organised storm. After showing these to MB he also commented on a meso/wallcloud like feature amongst them which I had seen in them too.
Now through Scone and heading north to escape any chance of a direct hit from its core we still had to battle severe outflow winds and dust which managed to blow down a small tree and a large branch. Flanking line with pileus leading to the Storm to the right of the frame.
I think the storm was powerful enough to have at some stage an organised appearance and perhaps was long lived enough to be of a multicell at the start and a singular cell for a good part of its passage from Merriwa eastwards. A link of all Images for that day is here:
http://australiasevereweather.com/rodney/photos/2007/rw20070207.html
