Thunder
Downunder 2000!
Photos by Anthony
Cornelius
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It I got woken up by a certain some one’s snoring in the morning – unable to go back to sleep, I had gotten up and decided to go for a drive. I looked outside – wow at the fog!!! It was quite exciting, the fog was extremely thick, so a fog chase was on. I SMSd Macca, who had only just woken up – I quickly went back to the motel to pick him up before driving around. It was just fun driving around the fog in the morning, it looked majestic over the mountains and vallies – we also saw a fogbow!!! Was just a bit of fun. When it cleared we then went back to the motel to the others, who were now just stirring. Jimmy and the others had stayed in Warwick overnight, they had left early to meet us in Glen Innes. We had a quick look at the computer to see what was happening in regards to the weather. A nice trough looked to effect the southern and central eastern parts of NSW the following day. There was also a marginal chance of something over the northern central tablelands region. Greg, Matt, Macca and I decided to leave early and head down towards Tamworth and have lunch, and then take a scenic route, eventually getting down into the southern Central Tablelands area later that arvo for the following day. We grabbed lunch at Tamworth and continued south, but we hadn’t eaten it yet. Some CJs were popping up to the south so we thought that we would find a small advantage point and eat lunch. It was certainly worth it as an rather nice little cell popped up just 15km away from us and pulsed away!
Eventually we decided that if it moved we’d chase it, it was looking nicer. We went back down towards Mullaley – the rainfeet it was developing was huge! Obviously from a succession of microbursts, and they were very defined and solid rainfeet.
We wanted to head north and get close to the cell, we got gusty winds and heavy rain – and we were following a 4WD on a dirt road. However unfortunately the 4WD decided to back out and did a u-turn before heading back onto the bitumen. The road was very soft, and we thought if a 4WD didn’t want to risk it, we didn’t either, so we reluctantly turned back, where we ended up having chaser convergence with the others who had just come back from their morning tea in Guyra!
It was a very interesting cell – in particular, one what we believed to have been a rainshaft. Certainly, that’s all it looked at at first, but it did look suspicious. Upon later inspection of the rainshaft (possible tornado), we confirmed it definitely was a tornado! When we did some digital enhancements, you could see that as the funnel area descended downards, some debris also rose upwards to meet it! Unfortunately, it later went behind the storm out of view, but it was still interesting to watch – certainly something that could be very easily mistaken as a rainshaft! The storms around us were weakening, although they still didn’t look too bad. A very strong, isolated cell was about 150km to our south.
We held a brief discussion about it…it was where we wanted to end up, so we decided to head south swiftly and see whether or not we could get a better view of it. The cells around us now had weakened substantially and we had to head south anyway! An hour later we had caught up with the storm at Merriwa – although it was still a little distance away from us, it was very nice in the sunlit area.
We decided to wait – there was the potential for a nice sunset – and that there was! A brilliant sunset with the storm, and also to the clouds to our west.
We decided to head towards Mudgee for the night, we phoned ahead and booked accommodation. We also saw lightning to the southwest a bit too! However it was distant and infrequent. Weary, we all generally had an early night – although not without discussing the tornado first! Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
