Northern Rivers Supercell!

November 1, 2006

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The models have certainly been having a shocking run across northeast NSW and southeast Queensland with instability continually and significant under-forecast and today was certainly no exception!  A nice southerly change was moving up the coast and a weak upper trough was pushing into the Northern Rivers.  Fresh N/NE winds were flowing down – it looked nice anywhere from Coffs to Lismore, but I was favouring the northern part as I was worried about early convection further south.

I had some work I couldn’t move – so despite the near-dawn start, I couldn’t leave Brisbane until midday.  I picked up Bryan on the way going through the Gold Coast and we headed down towards Ballina.  A rather nice storm (probable supercell given the hook on the precip radar!)  Was pushing northwards from Dorrigo.  As we approached the storm was certainly looking rather sick on radar – but it was having more updrafts continually go up which while were never fantastic, were still fairly strong.  

So we decided to head towards Lismore, and then a little further west towards Casino (but stopped halfway) to watch the cell.

It was not very impressive – the surrounding country made it look nice, but it was quite weak.  

However there were some updrafts developing along the flank and just around it.  

There were some very nice lowerings/possible wall cloud at times under the larger updrafts!  We were really hoping this would consolidate into something – and with the NE winds freshening we were really hoping for it!  Slowly but surely, a very large RFB began to develop which got us quite excited.  However the evolution that continued after this was very impressive!

The sun was still shining, but 500m east of us the updrafts had covered the cloud – we decided to drive under the shade from the cloud to get a better contrasted view of the storm – certainly a very different site!  

Curved inflow was beginning to wrap into a oval-shaped RFB which was continually getting rounder.  The inflow bands began to wrap around the storm and was really quite impressive!  

We shot back to the main road and then went towards Lismore – not before stopping soon after to take some photos of intense rain and hail rapidly wrapping around the meso!  

We continued tracking north to Lismore while stopping to take photos, but just north of Lismore it was beginning to become much more outflow dominated.  It was still looking nice though – albeit very outflow dominated.  

Towards Nimbin the storm rapidly weakened (still went for over 8 hours – albeit the middle part was fairly weak!)  But it gave for a lovely nice sunset to end a great supercell chase day!