Topic: NSW / S QLD Rain/Storms (incl Dunoon Tornado) 24 - 26 Oct 2007

[David Brodrick]

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING
for DAMAGING WIND and LARGE HAILSTONES
For people in the NORTH WEST SLOPES, NORTH WEST PLAINS and parts of the HUNTER, NORTHERN TABLELANDS, CENTRAL WEST SLOPES and CENTRAL WEST PLAINS Forecast Districts.

Issued at 12:49 pm Thursday, 25 October 2007.

Severe thunderstorms are likely to produce damaging winds and large hailstones in the warning area over the next several hours. Locations which may be affected include Tamworth, Gunnedah, Moree, Narrabri, Walgett and Coonamble.

Wind gusts to 74km/hr have been observed at Moree and hail has been reported in Tamworh at the time of issue.

[Mike]

wonderful strikes there Shauno - your'e getting your worth from these storms!  Pretty envious i can tell you!

[James]

Awesome shots Shaun! That last one in particular really stood out to me - The strong bolts in clear air give them such definition. Imagine being near them as they went off ...

Having yourself and David on the forums is great. It's nice being able to see what happened out there on storm days!

[Harley Pearman]

Hello

Storms on the NW slopes look impressive from the satellite photos. However, I have been watching a cluster of storms 50 KM NW of Albury near the town of Jerilderie (2 pm) which have also been active. There are no severe thunderstorm alerts on them yet on radar they appear to reasonable cells.

I have also spotted a cluster of storm cells west of Goulburn and near Yass (2.30 pm). Amazingly I have been watching the lightning trackers - 10,266 flashes and strikes between 1 pm and 2 pm with 2,662 occurring between 1.45 pm and 2 pm giving a rate of 177 per minute for that 15 minute period. Much of this is occurring over the NW slopes although a reasonable number is occurring over SW NSW.

Even yesterday there were active storms for many hours in the same general region. While watching the lightning activity using the Strikestar Lightning Tracker, I noted one single lightning strike occurring NW of Windsor at 5.07 pm. Other than that I have not observed or noted any real thunderstorm activity in Sydney to date.

Harley Pearman

[David C]

Great bunch of images there guys.

On the 'sounds of thunder' (might be a good dvd title ), I have always put that down, at least i  part,  to the acoustics of the terrain. Living up on a high point at Beacon Hill in Sydney for 7 years, I noticed that there was almost always a palpable shockwave with Cgs, even those that were not that close. It was as if you could feel it hit you but was brief, very discrete wave. Now I am in a valley of sorts and, well let me think back to the last time I heard thunder................., it definitely does not have the same impact.  Not science, just observations really.

Moree radar showing some nice cells at the moment, nothing terribly, organised, but heavy rain and plenty of lightning by the looks.





 

[Mike]

No doubt there's some merit in your post David.  My area is kinda in a low area compared to the rest of the place - undulating i guess you could call it, but i get the same booms with window rattling shock waves if the strike is even a little down the road - would it depend on the wind direction perhaps to enhance it - probably a topic for another thread...


Mike

[David Brodrick]

Here's some photos of a large storm complex over the Pilliga forest south of Narrabri this afternoon. I left it a bit late and the anvil cloud had covered most of the sky so the conditions weren't good for photography.

As David C noted the storms weren't very organised but there was a substantial shelf cloud for a little while.

We received an email from someone who lives out in the forest who said she had 29mm in 30 minutes and some small hail from this storm.

I noticed some bushfire smoke earlier on so I hope the rain fell whereever the fire was and lightning didn't start too many new ones!


ED - just compressed the file sizes a bit. MB

[Shaun Galman]

Hi guys,
Thanks to ALL for the great comments, very much appreciated!!!

James: Thanks for your kind words, it was great to have clear air bolts, just a shame it had rained in the morning and made all my high lookouts totally muddy and inaccsesable but we did realise those bolts were coming down in that area so it was probably for the best that I couldn't make it out there! Would've been nice to get out there as I would have been able to see the impacting area of the CG, but there will always be another time

Just posted the images here in sequence but still have to add the report which could take me a while to get through lol.

http://www.ridgelightning.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1416

We just missed out this afternoon, looks as if the Moree/Mungindi area is seeing some action at the mo, can't see any part of it on the horizon here unfortunately?

It's great to see such photogenic active storms here pre December/Janurary!
I hope and look forward to seeing a few shots from anyone out chasing the Eastern half today!

Nice structure in those shots David B. Great to see!
Cheers and take care guys.
Shauno 

[Jeff Brislane]

There is a nice cell just headed past Towoomba with a squall line chasing it and with a consistently good enough radar echo to suggest to me that it's possibly/probably a supercell. I hope someone is getting photos of it's structure allthough it's most likely High Precipitation so probably just a mean shelf cloud etc.

I'm Looking forward to more storms here overnight and tomorrow. It's certainly nice to be getting such a change in conditions from dry and windy to humid and thundery. Actually it feels more like February than October now.

It's interesting how often we seem to get good storm producing systems here in the east around October 25th to 30th. Maybe it would be a good subject for another thread.

Jeff.

[Harley Pearman]

Hello

At around 9.30 pm an active thunderstorm crossed NW Sydney bringing moderate to heavy bursts of rain, brief squally winds, a number of intra cloud lightning flashes and occasional cloud to ground lightning, especially where I was at Bella Vista.

This storm was unusual because it came in from the north tracking south. Later, looking at the radar images of it I noted that there was another nearby cell moving south but parallel to the coast.

I am not sure of rainfall totals but I am aware that Canterbury scored 20 mm of rain from it which seems to be the highest total that I could see to date.

The pair of storms seemed to be reasonably active. I viewed the Sydney Tri Star lightning tracker which showed 681 lightning flashes and strikes (various) with 192 CGs and 264 negative CGs. The rest were intra cloud flashes.

Harley Pearman

[James]

Some nice lightning active cells passed across Sydney this evening with some pretty strong strikes around the Hills region and further west/southwest. Once the rain cleared a little, I managed to get a few strikes on film towards the Blacktown area. Not a bad start to spring for Sydney - two storms so far with some pretty good lightning.

 

[Dave Nelson]

hi gang,

    a good storm over the western burbs last nite.  Cindy and I went out  and intercepted the south moving
storm at McGraths Hill (nth side of Rouse Hill)  about 9pm the rain was torrential making driving very difficult.
No hail encountered tho.
   As we were on our way up there we could see all the anvil flashes buried in the cloud above us. It wasnt till we
got to location did we get rain and many CG's.

My new DSLR Pentax K10D finally got its first storm workout with some good stills






cheers
Dave N

hey mods   I still cant figure out how to do inline images   hence my continued posting of links to my www site
help

Dave, do you mean posting images like this?

yes like this... thanks I see what you did in my post.    one day will find out how the other way is done too
with a thumbnail and is clicked on to produce a larger image 

[David Brodrick]

Hey Dave, Nice shots. I only figured inlines out yesterday. When you're writing your post click on additional options and then you can attach image files.

[Mike]

There's such a variety of lightning and cloud structures that I'm finding myself coming back to the thread just to show folk here at work and my daughter at home the shots - a great fortnights worth of activity for your parts down there, is anyone able to supply some data on the storms that came through regarding the photos posted?  A sounding, GFS or similar?

[David C]

Very impressive flangfest in the southwest suburbs last night!

As for today, it looks pretty decent if we can get some heating from noon say into early afternoon which I think will be the time to be out there (although I see a small cell has already fired up between Bilpin on Lithgow and put out a strike on the tracker). Storm motion will obviously have a large southerly component.