November 28th 2009Gday All,
As promised last night heres the report from yesterdays chase with Michael Bath. Got the phone call from MB at 1145am to see if I wanted to head out and naturally I said yes. He arrived not long after and we decided to head out to Casino to see what was happening. Eventually settled on a spot about 5km west of the township and watched some struggling local development. Meanwhile to the south more powerful looking updrafts were regularly punching up into the atmosphere.
We stayed in this spot for about 45mins before deciding that the southern storms looked more substantial so after a quick stop at Chasers Choice we made our way south. The first cell looked to be passing near Lawrence so we headed that way to see if we couldn't get ourselves into the first storm of the day. We arrived perhaps 15mins too late as the cell was in a weakening phase but we still were able to witness what appeared to be a mid level funnel.
You can just make it out in the middle top right of picture. MB will probably have a better zoomed in shot to illustrate it better.
It looked like the cell near Grafton was starting to get its act together so we shot south to witness would be the storm of the day. On the way there we passed through Southgate where it appeared there might have been a microburst or similar as there was a fair bit of debris scattered over the road. We then positioned ourselves at Junction Hill to witness the beast that was brewing to the west of Grafton. There was some crisp updrafts and the anvil was thickening up very nicely.
The storm really began to get organised now with what appeared to be a wall cloud feature and regular CG's punching out and it began to take on an ominous appearance.
4 Shot pano of storm
We watched this for a while then MB suggested we get get closer so we packed up the gear and off we went to punch it. Travelling through Grafton the outflow from the cell was pretty crazy possibly gusting 80-100km/hr with dust and branches being whipped along. We decided to take the Glenreagh/Ebor road to punch the beast and soon we entered very heavy rain with visibility reduced to less than 50m at times. Travelled a bit further along and soon the telltale thunk of hail started to hit the car with winds probably in the 80km/hr region. We conservatively guessed the size to be mostly in the 2-2.5cm with the possibility of some isolated bigger ones about. We weren't able to get a measurement till prob 10 mins after it passed so a little bit of melting had probably happened. We travelled a bit further south where we witnessed a tree had brought down power lines, I didn't get a pic of this but MB did. The retreating storm had a nice visible hailshaft lit up by the sun.
We let this storm retreat to the south and headed back into Grafton to see what else was developing. As luck would have a nice lightning active cell was approaching so found a spot and set up with the hope of catching some late arvo CGs. We got pretty lucky and I managed to bag a few nice ones. There was also a very nice rain free base that persisted for a while.
Rain finally forced to pack up our gear and after a quick radar check we decided to venture back north in the hope of grabbing some more action. Unfortunately nothing was happening around the area further north with most activity that was approaching from the west dying out. We stopped at Casino and had a final radar check and noticed there was some lightning active cells still to the south, although offshore. So off we went to try and bag some more lightning pics but it was all pretty distant and we weren't really prepared to do another long drive. So we stopped at a vantage point near Woodburn and got some shots there but the temptation was too much and we ventured into Evans Head to watch a nice, but very distant offshore CG fest.
Our images were beginning to come about a bit dodgy despite shooting at f/1.8 so we called it a night.
Well what can I say it was a very satisfying day, managed to bag some quite nice action and the Fozzie managed to get her very first hailstorm since I got her in 12mths ago. It was a real pleasure to get out with MB again after what seems like an eternity and talk to him about all things storm related. Sorry about the long winded nature of the report but wanted to make sure I got all the details right and show the best of my pics. Till next time,
Cheers
Jason