Harrisville Supercell

October 19, 2006

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Today was one of these days where everything just went right!  Although it didn’t look too bad – there was a decent 10-15 knot NE inflow with 25-30 knots W @ 500mb – just enough for supercells!  While CAPE could have been a bit better, but at around 1200-1500 and LIs of around -5 there was certainly a bit of instability around!

It had been an extremely busy week – and today was no different.  I had a pile of stuff to do in the morning, but starting early I was able to finish it all and at 12:40pm was ready to head out – and was quite eager to also with storms already developing throughout the northern part of the Northern Rivers!  However while packing my bag of gear up I realized that I was out of video tape – doh!!!  So had to race into Harvey Norman and pick up some tape before shooting south.  My main aim was to get to Boonah – but I thought I’d go via Beaudesert first.  It allowed me to stop briefly in Beaudesert and assess things and with the E3 closed in Brisbane, traffic was a nightmare so I thought that the less time spent in Brisbane the better!

From Beaudesert I felt that I definitely had to continue to Boonah!  The storms in NE NSW were spreading across into a messy area of rain south of Beaudesert, but around the Boonah-Warwick corridor there appeared to be plenty of fresh convection. 

I shot towards Boonah and saw a weak guster and anvil, but the storm really couldn’t do much and it soon seemed to collapse and die. 

There was more developing to the SW of Boonah so I decided to shoot westwards and get out of the decaying cell – things seemed to be struggling and high-based, and was really hoping for one of the cells to take off – and finally one did!

From the Cunningham Hwy I could see some nicer updrafts – they didn’t seem fantastic, but it looked as if the storm would at least carry some sort of punch.  I continued southwards to get closer, finally stopping just north of the Boonah exit.  It looked…well, a little interesting to say the least. 

There was some very strong winds in the storm with the rain in the storm being blown very much westwards – while above the sky was extremely turbulent and what appeared to be a little outflow base was developing on the edge of the precip.

I decided to drift north with it – what originally looked very much like a developing guster very quickly became a developing meso though! 

There was some decent inflow to start with, around 10-15 knots, but it was progressively getting stronger and the meso was getting larger! 

At one point the inflow was a sustained 20-25 knots with gusts in excess of gale force!!!  A few times the winds caught me off-balance while I was taking photos and nearly got pushed over! 

I couldn’t get over the size of it – absolutely massive with nice green banding around it.  Nice broadscale rotation – and while very visible, never seemed to really rotate that fast nor even hint at putting out a wall cloud.

Before I knew it, over 40 minutes had past and the storm seemed to becoming more outflow dominant and very HP-ish. 

But I was amazed at how quickly the storm collapsed soon after!  A cell did develop just to its west and perhaps that gave too much cool air – not sure on that but really was amazed at the really quick decay! 

A huge line of traffic was now bumper to bumper from the storm going to Brisbane (always a sign of a strong storm).  So I met up with Bryan who was also chasing nearby and we sat it out at the Amberley Mobil servo and watched a nice sunset to finish off a great day!