My first decent Australian chase for the season - video of hail and lightning

[Michael Thompson]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial] Monday the 27th I chased in the Guyra / Glen Innes area of New South Wales. Convection was supressed with the first scrap of Cu not appearing until around lunchtime, the first turkeys not until at least 1pm, but then over a single hour period it exploded.

I headed east from Guyra towards Ebor ( close to coast, but at 4000ft alt ) ) as DP's were a concern, this paid off as a cell near the tablelands escarpment tapped coastal moisture.

I had chaser convergance with Jimmy Deguara, this is about the 5th time this has ocurred with no communication or planning to do so. You are confident that you are on the best storm of the day when you run in Jimmy. ( In Australia it is rare to see another chaser )

The storm developed a small but severe hail core, Jimmy measured stones to 5cm ( 2ins ) -(that is his car on the other side of the road in the video). We suspected that this storm was a right moving supercell.

We tracked the storm north for the next hour or two along the New England Escarpment, using the most easterly road options we could find, which was a dirt goat track with grass growing down the middle in parts. The country was hilly, alternateting between isolated farms ( of the duelling banjo variety ) and forest.

Unfortunately the road hooked NW near Glen Innes, losing us the storm. In Glen Innes I was treated to several hours of lightning as the three dominate cells [/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial]( suspected SC's ) [/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial]and other later developing junk merged into a larger convective complex.

Video contains scences of hail and lightning. I think its worth a look. The ominous base is NOT one of the supercells, but the junk filling the remaining gaps of clear sky later.

http://ozthunder.com/video/glen_pv.wmv[/FONT]

 

[Dave Nelson]

nice one Michael,
some decent size hail and good lightning bolts

think my wife and I will be heading up that part of nthrn NSW this saturday ...
Will leave Sydney early saturday morn and get to the Tamworth region in time
to see afternoon activity start up, staying up there the nite.

the CAPE and LI is looking good for that region this weekend
with the passing of the next troughline through the area

Due to work commitments my long haul chases are restricted to
weekends


cheers
Dave N

 

[MJ Poore]

It looks and sounds just like the Eastern Drakensberg escarpment on my side of the ocean.

 

[Jimmy Deguara]

Hi Michael,

The supercell was a nice one to chase and certainly interesting in its behaviour. Did I say left moving or right moving - it was certainly a left mover - that was what I had in mind and meant to say In fact it moved sharply near 90 degrees of the steering wind flow - moving NNW in direction.

To be precise, I will have to change the 2 inch hail measured to 4.7cm diameter when I looked closely on the computer as compared to a viewfinder on the camera. But this was hail melting due to the time we spent without measuring. It was the longest period of hail I have observed without moving from one location!

I also moved north to near Tenterfiled to get some reasonable structure shots of the HP structure complete with shelf cloud.

I will post pictures soon - here is more on the related thread:

http://www.australiasevereweather.com/forum/index.php?topic=210.0

Some awesome lightning pictures by Michael Bath in this thread.

Regards,

Jimmy Deguara

 

[Michael Thompson]

Hi Jimmy,

No mistake on your behalf, I am always getting my left and right hands confused.

Anyway back to the storm. The sat picture belows shows the importnace of chasing boundaries. In our case a kind of dryline, but not in the mid west sense, as the air behind the dryline was still very unstable.

If you look at the picture you can see the coastal strato cumulus junk in a distinct band up the coast and penetrating inland a few miles. The trough was aligned very roughly east/west in the region of the storms. Note how the our storm (the top and right most on the picture) is seen clearly tapping the moisture, but it did form right on the boundary as east of the boundary had no convection, despite abundant moisture.

After tracking back to Glen Innes I became interested in the lightning from the higher based stuff westwards. Outflow from our storm actually introduced some moisture, and after dark the whole area took off with lightning. The whole lot developed into a convective complex, but a small one.

On a side note to the lightning - a chaser was struck, the chaser wants to remain anomymous, it left several long red track marks radiating from the shoulder ( there is a picture and I hope that it gets posted one day ). The chaser was dazed for several minutes and has a very sore shoulder, but otherwise is OK. It was obviously not a direct strike. The same chaser 5 years ago in the very same town ( Glen Innes ), and not more than 500 yards away from Monday's bolt, had sparks fall all over his car as he passed under a telegraph pole that scored a direct hit. I was in the car behind.

 

[Jimmy Deguara]

Hi guys,

Here are a few pictures from this particular chase:

Base structure of the storm - I have to check video for this component as there was this funnel like base persisting for a little while

Let's just say the measured hail size has to be revised to 4.6 or 4.7cm in diameter - this was once again a rush job - however I can say that considerable melting had taken place

Supercell approaching near Tenterfield

More here:
http://www.australiasevereweather.com/forum/index.php?topic=210.20

Regards,
Jimmy Deguara

 

[PeteMcConnell]

Good stuff Jimmy! The hail looked to have been tennis ball or base ball before you got to it. Keep feeding us these good photos to get us through our down time over here in the states. Be safe!