Oakey • Sat 13 Jan 2007
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Starting
late on the north side of town
today, we left around 1:30pm for
what felt like a very long drive
through the mountains.
The
potential today was incredible.
The CAPE charts were unusually
high but it was all plotted along
a north-south line inland, but
seemingly not too far from
Brisbane. Generally with such
high CAPE in the vicinity I would
say Brisbane was a shoe-in for
some activity, but the Bureau had
confidently predicted that the
city would get nothing.
Undoubtedly, there are many other
factors I'm unaware of, but I do
know the steering winds were
generally north (even the upper
level winds were directly north)
and winds were low, so these
storms weren't going to move
quickly.
I was happy
to start on the north end of the
line. With the storms tracking
north, I'd rather head down to
meet them than spend all day
chasing them from behind. Trouble
was we were so far north when the
activity was starting down in
Tenterfield.
However, we
did see the above anvil directly
to our west and figured something
must've been happening.
There was
also a good updraft just to it's
north (our NW), so we decided to
head up to Kilcoy and travel
west from there so we would still
be ahead of any activity. Around
Yarraman we saw some small
funnels.
  
Apparently,
there was some radar activity
west of Toowoomba, so we headed
down the New England Hwy with a
plan to duck in west off the
highway to Oakey. At a small town
called Haden (NE of Oakey) the
sun started to set.
  
As it
darkened lightning (including
forks) became visible from two
cells either side of the setting
sun, so we decided to continue to
Oakey, then follow the Warrego
Hwy NW towards Dalby to see how
close we could get.
We'd spent
a long time driving today for not
much action, so we stopped
halfway to Dalby for a good look,
and several cells were now
lightning active and giving us
quite a show!
 
At about 8pm with our
focus on these storms to the
west, suddenly a bright fork
landed about 10kms away to our
south. This fork was then
followed by a spectacular show of
vivid CGs which moved progressively closer to us with barely any sheet
lightning or rain to spoil the
photos.
     
Surface winds were
easterly from the ocean and as the storm approached
instead of the usual outflow of
westerlies or south-westerlies that normally occurs,
the easterlies actually increased, probably because we were on the NW edge of the storm. Soon enough the booms of
thunder became cracks as
lightning started landing within
a distance (about 2kms) that
started to make me wonder whether
we should enjoy the show from the
car. I braced myself for a big
one, but it didn't happen... within about 20 mins our
short but spectacular show was
over. Interestingly, this
activity appeared as very weak on
radar (the tiny yellow and blue
bit between Dalby and Oakey
below), showing that you don't necessarily need a large cell on radar to produce a great light show.
Lightning
was of course still continuing
from about four different cells
from our SW around to our NE, but
it was a fair way off and nothing
like what we'd just seen.
My partner
and I were both pretty tired from a job this morning and
all the driving. We weren't keen
to keep heading further away from
home and we figured it wasn't
going to get any better than what
we'd just seen so we decided to
call it a night.
About five
minutes down the road a new cell
started firing still to our west
but closer than the others! We
turned around and watched for a
while, but it wasn't impressive
enough to hold our attention
longer than about ten minutes,
and it was heading away from us.
We finally turned around again at about 9:30pm
and headed home.
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