12/23/08 DISC: NSW, Australia

[Jimmy Deguara]

A tornado was reported and photographed today in the southern highlands south of Canberra. Wow - the storm exploded and this is what resulted. What are your thoughts!
http://members.iinet.net.au/~atkinson3/public_html/weather/n-tornado24-sized.jpg
This was definitely outside of my target region to chase. This region is reasonably high as the storms in this region are usually high based too!
Some discussion about it here:
http://www.australiasevereweather.c...ld-vic-storms-22-26-dec-2008/msg9962/#msg9962
Regards,
Jimmy Deguara

 

[Bill Hark]

Jimmy, that is a beautiful image. Great for a future book on Australian weather! I would guess it was a non chaser that photographed the storm since it was outside of a usual target area. Hopefully, there is also some video.

Bill Hark

 

[Michael Thompson]

I may add that GFS model had pretty much nailed the area with well over 2000 CAPE and adequate windshear, although not flash by mid west shear.

However a weak triple point may have been the factor with a SE wind surge pushing up the coast and coastal escarpment. This tornado occurred in the area where the tablelands starts just west of the coastal escarpment, about 70 miles inland. Cool SE winds would have been trying to push further inland against more warmer N/NW winds.

Although the SE wind is a storm killer on the NSW coast it can inject moisture and lower LCL on the boundary, especially if the SE struggling to make inroads and was lagging inland (like yesterday, for example the SE change was able to surge 150 miles further north up the narrow adjacent coastal strip)

Frustrating day for many chasers including myself as early AM convection scattered bombed my initial target which was further north near Goulburn ( 150 miles SW of Sydney) leaving a huge convection hole by the afternoon. Wise chasers headed further northwards ( 300 miles north of the tornado) and scored some non-tornadic supercells, which if anything were in stronger shear.

The tornadic storm was not on chase targets as the area has two roads and pretty much dirt tracks ( heavilly forested and hilly ) in between.

The storm developed early around 10am in clearer air behind all the junk. It persisted on radar as a discreet cell for several hours. Below is a radar frame around 1pm that I am only guessing matches closely to time to the photo Jimmy posted a link too..

Local news article.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/new...ts-and-turns-on-road-to-canberra/1394600.aspx