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The morning of this day couldn’t have started any better…and that trend was to continue for the entire day! One of the best chases I can remember, more so being able to witness the entire evolution of a rather photogenic supercell and the fact that it basically followed the only road in the region! The sky was bubbling with instability, even at 9am there were CJs rocketing up towards 15-20,000ft.
We decided that the cap though was too weak where we were, and we had to go north. We headed back to Miles, and then headed north on the Carnarvon Hwy. We had checked with police about the roads as there were floods in the area, unfortunately the area towards Rolleston was flooded, we had to go through the Central Highlands region and detour almost through Rockhampton. We headed up through Taroom, and towards Theodore. Storms were rapidly building to our west.
Before midday, static was constant, with a mass of “kssschhh” on the lightning tracker (aka, AM radio). We were watching a storm to the NW.
It was going to cross the road in front of us, we decided to pull over and wait for a while, it was producing extremely turbulent outflow under a rather thick and mean gustfront. The thunder was absolutely incredible – I had heard of constant thunder (ie, one rumble of thunder rolling into another), but this thunder was purely constant – just one big roar of thunder!!! I’d never heard anything like it. The SE’ly change though was fast pushing up behind us, we had no choice but to go further north or get trapped in a mass of rain, storms and stratocu. We had to core punch, we discussed it and decided that the most probable scenario was very heavy rain, the storm did not look as if it’d contain large hail or severe winds, or a tornado for that matter. We headed north – well, we were right about the rain! It was torrential, and there were some great flangs, occurring within about 300-600m of the car along the side of the road. We got them on video, while also getting wet as we had to keep rolling down the windows to hear them. The rain was so intense we all lost site of each other. Four cars following each other at about 20m apart, and no one could see the car in front of them! We didn’t communicate either, before we went through we all agreed no communication over the CB radio (in case the antenna got struck by lightning), fortunately it ended up being just as it was intended to be – a precaution and nothing else. We eventually got out of the storm and continued a little further north. Our eyes were fixed on a storm that had just developed to the NW of the storm we went through. It was looking, well – interesting. It appeared to have potential, so we stopped and watched it for a while.
Very soon it began developing an interesting lowering under the base on its northern edge, this soon developed into a small baby wallcloud with a small tail cloud feeding into it.
What was at first just a small wall cloud developed quite rapidly into a beautiful circular and tiered wall cloud, with strongly visible rotation and defined inflow – it was though, anticyclonic! A bit of an anti-climax, to have such a great wallcloud and have it rotate the “wrong” way!!!
But oh well, it was still absolutely fantasmorgical, and we were all tremendously excited. The road went NNNE, the storm was going NNE, the storm was slowly moving over onto the road where it’d pass in front of us. The cell passed over or very close to the poor town of “Banana” – Banana was nearly going to become no more! But we think it went just to the south of the town, fortunately for the residents!
We watched, as the wallcloud lost a little of its structure (now about 30 minutes old), but actually looked “nastier” in the sense of looks, as it was taking on a square-like barrel. The CGs coming out of this area were fantastic too! All striking around the base of the wallcloud, although one CG gave us a fright, because it struck ahead of the storm in front of us! It’s a little unnerving when that happens, as you realise that you’re well within the lightning area. Of course, you’re always have the threat of lightning, but this makes you more alert to the risk when something unexpected like that happens.
We were getting strong outflow, up to 25-30 knots outside of the storm, it was very cold! Dropping the temperature from the low 30s to the mid 20s, and the trees were swaying like mad. But we didn’t experience anything severe. Unfortunately, towards an hour of its lifecycle, the storm had now weakened a little and moved more to the NE, it was veering away from the road so we were left with trying to find another storm. There were plenty around though! Some absolute monsters to the north, but they were towards Emerald, and the time that we had spent with the previous storms meant that there was no way of catching up to these storms. Had the road not been flooded to the NW, we could have – but given we’d have to do a several hundred kilometre detour we couldn’t. We watched some of the storms around the area, and some great updrafts to the north!
Before finally heading north towards Rockhampton. I’m not sure whether we intended to or not, but we eventually “found” ourselves into Rocky. I’d never visited Rocky before, so I was quite happy to! Unfortunately though, due to the storms there had been some small landslides on the range coming down to Rockhampton. Geoff and Jimmy had a flat tyre from one of the rocks, so it ended up being good that we were in Rocky as they were able to get this fixed. And with what had been a great few days to the start of TDU, we decided that in the morning we needed to restock up on some of our supplies, such as film, video tape and food. We arrived in the caravan park and got some accommodation – not without a welcoming crack of thunder from a CG about 2km away though! It was a nice touch. After such a fruitful chase, and after nearly a week being away from any sort of “city” civilisation (we are after all, “city folk”), we decided to pigout. It was a night at Sizzlers for 8 hungry stormchasers who had not really eaten that much to try and save money, that and there was not much time to eat! Poor Sizzlers would have shut their doors if they had known we were turning up – was great to get a good meal in you though! We ended up going back to the cabin and once again, when we received an unexpected call from Doc. We liked unexpected calls from Doc – it normally heralded good news! And it certainly did, he mentioned an MCS had formed just to our north. We didn’t have a view where we were, so Macca and I decided to search for a lookout and see if we could see anything, and if so call the others to join us. It was cloudy above us with straotcu, it was not looking hopeful – we ended up finding a lookout on a small mountain to the east of Rocky. Interestingly, we hit a cockatoo on the way to it – it was not nice, although what a cockatoo was doing late at night flying about I’m not sure! It gave us a fright though, because we were not going overly fast (50km/h), and it landed with a tremendous “thump” on the roof! We ended up finding the road, but we were soon enveloped in thick fog. We continued climbing though, it was a narrow road, and there was nowhere to do a u-turn and turn back, especially not in the fog, which was near zero visibility. We ended up having to follow the reflectors – we’d try and find the next reflector, and note it and then find the next and the next – was a very slow process climbing at 10-20km/h. The fog did clear a little at the top…but there was no use, visibility was still about only 20m, so we ended up going back down. But it was worth a try anyway. We decided to watch the now ritualistic storm footage of the day. It was great to see, being the main driver you don’t often see everything and this gives you an opportunity to sit back and relax and watch the video, and remember how the day went. Macca went through frame by frame some of the CGs – they were awesome! Especially one that branched out like anything, certainly a great shot!!! Matt decided to meet up with his uncle for the night though, and didn’t come back until later. The thing about cabins
is that most of them have bunk beds – which is fine, if you’re shorter
than 6 foot. So I decided to opt for the small couch on the floor
– it was more like a cushion than anything though. Still, it gave
a good night sleep…until I fell out of bed (well, couch), and woke up half
the cabin with a thundering “thump” on the floor. But it gives you
something to laugh about!
Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
