Storm Chase 22nd November, 2003

Today was not overly exciting with positive LI values on the skew-T and cloudy conditions. This was not representative of the situation as the temp reached 33 degrees almost and allowed for extra heating. The dp's were hovering in the high teens for most of the day and it wasn't until mid-day that the first activity started just outside Warwick.

It took a while to gather strength however it wasn't until 2pm that cells started appearing explosively on the radar. One particular cell near Oakey went from nothing to almost maximum intensity in 20 minutes and remained at that for half an hour. The sky towards the west and south west by this stage was starting to become quite dark.

Several light showers had passed over by this time which really moved the humidity up to uncomfortable levels. By 3pm the temperature was 27.6 with a 20.3 degree dewpoint. More RFB's continued to pass over and by this time, the radar was becoming quite cluttered with thundery showers. I wasn't expecting anything exciting to occur now and was only expecting some rain later on.

At around 5pm, things suddenly changed for the better. A moist north-easterly that had started up at 3:30pm had begun to feed plenty of moisture into a cell outside of Beaudesert. Most of the activity was still heading south-east but quickly changed to the usual north-east direction. This cell intensified very quickly and a gust front appeared.

A slight tinge of green was evident under the guster which was now starting to take on a ragged appearance as the heavy precipitation was starting. And didn't the skies open up! Torrential rainfall started without any warning and not long after this, very strong winds started to occur. The rate the whole system was moving at was incredible. Scud was absolutely racing by at around 50-60km/hr I guess. It could have even been higher.

I started recording some footage of the deluge however, half way through recording, the camera comes up and says my batteries are dead! what luck. I had to race upstairs and quickly place new batteries in. The rain was still bucketing down and the gutters were absolutely overflowing. Finally 15 minutes later it disappeared as quick as it came. I recorded some more footage of the clouds racing by. 6.2mm was recorded by the Archerfield station however, they only received the tail end of the storm. I think that something like 15-20mm was received by the amount of water around.

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