Wednesday 8th of November

Chase Report

A large area of strong instability and a weak to non-existant cap brought about an afternoon of storms going all directions in South East Queensland and Wide Bay. Two HP supercells developed, one tracking through the Gold Coast and another going from west of Brisbane to cross the coast near Tewantin. I chased the Sunshine Coast cell from the northern suburbs of Brisbane to Maroochydore.

I finished work at around lunch time and could see the storm to the west of Brisbane. It was already dark red on radar and looking quite dark visually. There wasn't much to be seen where I was at Geebung, so I headed to the roof of Toombul Shopping Centre to eat some lunch and get a good look at the cell. Directly in front of it was a circular looking low cloud feature which i initially thought was an RFB area. It actually turned out to be an inflow band. It did have a prong like feature to the left though which confused me a bit. You can't really see it in the photos though. The anvil was huge over my head and had quite good mammatus features. When I had left work the cell had been coming directly at Brisbane. After a while though it appeared to be moving to the north.

Unfortunately I underestimated how far north it was going to turn. In the northern suburbs of Brisbane I experienced 60-80km/h inflow winds. I travelled through Redcliffe, Caboolture and then eventually Caloundra. From Morayfield onwards there was a lot of rain around. A couple of times I broke out of the rain but then ended up back in it again. Couldn't really see a lot, except a few roundish looking cloud bases ahead. They were probably more inflow bands. I thought I was in front of the cell at Caloundra, but it overtook me quickly, it seemed to be at Nambour by this stage. I kept driving north along Nicklin Way but the frustrating traffic slowed me down and the rain was getting heavy. I was getting seriously worried due to reports on uhf cb of golf ball sized hail not far from where I was.

I finally got onto the Sunshine Motorway, but the storm had now reached the road ahead of me and the traffic was slowed to a dead stop. I got off at the Maroochydore exit, and started looking for a place to shelter from any hail. I found a good spot at Sunshine Plaza and went inside to find an internet connection. Looking at the radar I discovered that the core which was black on radar was only a few km from Maroochydore and it then crossed the Sunshine Motorway and headed out through Tewantin. Probably if I'd continued north I would have got the golf ball sized hail. Not that golf balls was bad compared to the cricket balls Macca got out at Esk. The radar indicated the rest of it had turned into a multicell system with stuff everywhere, so I decided to head for home. I was hoping for a lightshow, but unfortunately all we got was more rainbands.