Topic: Darwin Storm events 2008/2009

[cloudfairy]

we had some storms in Darwin yesterday late afternoon. One coming from the south the other from ENE. The merged together over the sea.


I took the first two pics from the top of the Met Building in Casuarina and the last pic from Casuarina Beach.

[cloudfairy]

Heya,

I managed to get some lightning yesterday. behind Humpty Doo and then Adelaide River Floodplains (with heaps of millions of mosquitos  > )

[RainBird]

Great lightning Renate!!
That loopy crawler is awesome! Well done

[cloudfairy]

Am I the only one up here???? Mike, Adrian, where are you?????

That's from today. I drove too far inland.....so I missed most of this nice very active coastal cell

Hope you guys got more!!!

[Adrian]

Hi Renate,

Sorry .... have been bogged down with work & travel  

Have been watching your posts .... some great shots.

Hopefully this weekend will bring some action.

Cheers,
.adrian

[cloudfairy]

Today is St. Patrick's Day and I love Ireland!!!!!! And it was soooo dry today.....nothing.....nothing out there....so I decided to go party and celebrate my favorite country!!!

 :'(  :'(  :'(  :'(  :'(  :'(  :'(
I missed this wonderful storm.....

[RainBird]

I was really eager to head out around the Darwin area to watch the late afternoon skies for a possible chase..
I invited a good friend to come out chasing but they were totally convinced that it would be dry and thought I was just 'clutching straws' that it would rain.. 
I headed out on my own and found a good spot down at the wharf and watched...  Finally near sundown huge towers exploded north of Adelaide River, SE of Darwin, Already being at the wharf I was just in the right spot to capture some CGs and structure photos.

As the storm approached Darwin it produced a very large shelf cloud and incredible outflow winds with gusts recorded up to 100km/h.
I observed some felled trees, a traffic accident and several snapped branches around the CBD and Fannie Bay areas.
No STW was issued prior to the thunderstorm! 

[cloudfairy]

yesterday a strong storm cell developed to the east moving northwestwards. I heard that there was a warning out for a gusty storm, when I was down at east arm wharf to get some pics. from a southwestern cell I saw a nice long cg (of course I missed it).
Then I decided to try catching this northern cell. I had no idea which road to take, so I tried Howard Springs, Gunn Point Rd but didn't dare to drive on the dirt road with a non-4WD and knowing that a storm is coming. So I turned around and got a sunset shelf on the Stuart Highway. I stopped on a little road beside the Highway, not realizing that it leads to the defense site. A car stopped beside me then and the guy was so nice, asking me what I'm doing, and that I shouldn't take pictures of the defence site....I wasn't I wanted to catch an interesting cloudband above the shelf.....anyway I had to move on (that's why I cut the foreground on one pic).
I drove to a sideroad past Humpty Doo...the famous one
Missed nice crawler because my camera takes ages for saving.
The lightning moved further to my left and I decided to drive this road further (no idea where it leads me). Behind a right bend I stopped and managed to get two cgs...two small ones.....guess what my camera was doing when the long and closer ones happened?
Then again I drove further, turned right.....and left...and....I can't remember....after a while I realized that there are trees everywhere and no gap in between. I also realized that I can't remember the way back.....as I saw the storm to my right.... I roughly knew where I was heading to....the direction, not where I am....anyway, I found my way back pretty frustrated because of my camera....

[Michael Bath]

Boy - some frustrations and difficulties on that chase Renate!
The BoM issued a number of warnings as the storms came into Darwin. The sounding from yesterday (23rd March) is interesting with quite a lot of dry air aloft.

[RainBird]

I managed a couple of shots out near Lambell's Lagoon and Middle Point late in the afternoon towards nightfall.
The stoms lacked promising lightning activity especially to Darwin's standards, most lightning was intracloud or small cralwers with the very occasional CG touching down in the most unexpected places.

The storms became outflow dominant prior to reaching Darwin, leaving me the only option to try my luck on the other side of the pricip shaft for some rear-firing lightning beneath the anvil.  I did manage an interesting shot of the guster with an unusual rounded dry based cell on the northern edge which kind of reminded me of a supercell, though the apparent lack of vorticity and due to climatic factors, it is very unlikely.

After piercing through the rain, I set up camera near the Middle Point transmissions field where I managed some small anvil crawlers on nightfall.
All in all, this was a very difficult storm to find a photogenic opportunity with, but that's the joys and excitement of chasing, much like going fishing in a sense

Cheers,

Jacci

[cloudfairy]

Boy - some frustrations and difficulties on that chase Renate!
The BoM issued a number of warnings as the storms came into Darwin. The sounding from yesterday (23rd March) is interesting with quite a lot of dry air aloft.

you are right we have a deep dryness in the midlevels. but we also had westerlies and this gulf line. and during the day you could see how more and more convection started....nothing too solid or strong but compared to the last week....
I think this gulf line was strong enough to make it to the westerlies around darwin to get more feed.....I had a look at the radar loop from last night and you can see how it redeveloped a couple of times and merged with stuff from the south. and thats what I experienced....it weakened so many times, and I was always about to drive home....then it started again with more frequent flickers.

radar loop

[cloudfairy]

Heya mates!!!! Life is great.....forget what I was complaining about yesterday
Life is fantastic again!!!
We had a wonderful, beautiful multicell developing over annaburro, or I guess it was a multicell first and developed to a squall line. The forecast was a late gusty storm, and BoM was right!
crispy and gusty and like electric dynamite
loop

Anyway, I was out there with Mike and we got the feeling that Darwin might not be the right spot for this storm so we drove to Mendora. On our way we had the black cloudfront in our back painted with nice rainbows.

In Mendora (omg, still smiling, and giggling) we were welcomed at the jetty by a huge impressive shelf cloud.
As it went over us we had heavy rain and strong wind and heard something about a knocked down tree on Arnhem Highway around Humpty Doo.

Well, as it was getting dark the lightning (and the rain) was above us. We had trouble to adjust the car in the right position, there was lightning everywhere and wonderful ones....long strong flickering cgs. I'm still excited about it.

After a while the strikes were getting shorter, so we drove after it and got a couple of good ones from another beach.


(Mike, you're welcome to add your text and of course, please, your photos. I'm not that good in writing.)

[RainBird]

Wow!!
Great work Renate!
Some of those CGs look like they would of been rather close.
The shelfie and lightning pics are awesome and wow the rainbow, real icing on the cake
Those storms literally rained down thousands of CGs, both massive staccatos and pulsing strikes around the greater Darwin area yesterday evening, good to see our normal storms have returned, only thing is it has left it right until the end of the season lol.

Thanks for sharing

[cloudfairy]

well, I didn't zoom in and they didn't fit into the picture....yer they were close!!!!!! It was ......don't have a word for that!!

[cloudfairy]

hey guys,...

we are still alive, up here.....
and we got a storm (our last one?) in the night from Saturday to Sunday (midnight till 2am). Passing us by to the north, between Tiwi Islands and Gunn Point. So, it was pretty far away, but therefor I got nice pics with lightning reflecting on the the sea.