Thunder Downunder 2000! "Warrego Frontloaders" 
Photos by Anthony Cornelius November 20, 2000 Back to Thunder Downunder 2000 Chase Reports
The following morning we all woke up a little later than usual, a bit after 7am – all of us getting a little weary after a few days of long drives and chasing. We talked to Jimmy, who was chasing with Geoff Thurtell, Nick Moir and Mark Dwyer (who came over from WA). They were at Cunnamulla – we pondered waiting for them, but after talking to Doc, he suggested that we should be trying to leave as early as possible, as the trough had advanced overnight. That was evident with the westerly winds we were having, even though it was very humid with DPs in the mid 20s near Charleville by 9am. We went to the bakery and get some sandwiches to pack – this ended up being something we did quite often from then on, it was convenient having food in the car/esky when you wanted it, and not whenever you were going through a town. We headed east along the Warrego Hwy – we got caught up at roadworks near Mitchell, but we had a good view of the storms developing to our E. In fact, it was wall to wall Cb by midday!
We had to keep going east, fortunately they weren’t moving too quickly so it was good – we caught up with a nice photogenic little front loader just east of Roma.
But another cell to the south was looking quite promising. It had a very interesting lowered base, after going through the video footage and photos, this was most probably a wallcloud.
A few minutes later I was watching it (and also watching the road too – honestly! Stormchasers have wide peripheral vision!) When a funnel started to descend rapidly. Of course, we were in a treed in area! But it was a nicely descended funnel, about half way to the ground – one of the better funnels I’ve seen! We tried to get out of the trees, but to no avail. It wasn’t until we got further along into a small clearing we had a glimpse, but it was gone. However Macca did video another funnel from this later on (and decided not to tell anyone!!!) When we did stop, it was still evident that it was a wallcloud, although it was weakening and becoming absorbed into the gustfront region to its south. It was still looking nasty and green though – and we stopped ahead of it and videod a couple of nice CGs and cracks of thunder before heading east again. As often the case when storms develop early, it was getting cluttered around the place. At Chinchilla we stopped for a while and watched some more prospective storms to the distant SE, but there were no roads down there so it wasn’t much point heading after them. Instead we waited for a little while, before getting a call from Jimmy. They had arrived in Chinchilla! We were about 10km outside of Chinchilla, so they kept going. They had to have been doing a good speed to get to Chinchilla so quickly, given they were 200km away from us and we both left around the same time! We finally met up with them – chaser convergence! Although somewhat planned chaser convergence. After a jubilation of greetings, we watched the storms to the SE, it was taking on a nicer characteristic.
We decided to chase it as it came closer, but it stayed in a treed in area, but Jimmy and the others got some good photos from it along the Warrego Hwy in a small clearing earlier, showing some HPS characteristics.
It was a nice sunset at the end of the day, and we had sunlit Cbs to the east that had occurred in the eastern Downs and SE QLD region. We decided to stay the night in Chinchilla – booking out 2 cabins and we bought some Chinese takeaway. We won’t be buying food from there again though! It wasn’t the best. We saw some lightning to the west later on that night, but it was fairly distant, but still nice to watching before retiring for the night. Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
